Combining trust and reputation as user influence in cross domain group recommender system (CDGRS)

Abstract

Group recommender system provides suggestions for a group of users by exploring the choices of individual users of the group. Popularity of group recommender systems is increasing because many activities such as listening to music, watching movies, traveling, etc. are normally performed in groups rather individually. Group recommender systems like personal recommender systems also suffer from cold start and sparsity issues. The cold start and sparsity issues result into inaccurate recommendation computation which degrades the recommendation quality. To handle the cold start and sparsity issues in a Group Recommender System (GRS), this paper proposes to use cross domain approach and introduces Cross Domain Group Recommender System (CDGRS). The recommendations provided by trustworthy and reputed users in the group enhance the acceptance towards the presented recommendations as compared to the other individuals in the group. We have combined the social factors e.g. trust and reputation to get influential user in the group recommendation. A prototype of the system is developed for tourism domain that incorporates four sub-domains i.e. restaurants, hotels, tourist places and shopping places. The performance of CDGRS is compared with GRS. Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient, MAE, RMSE, Precision, Recall and F-measure are used to find the accuracy of the generated recommendations.