Are heterogeinity and conflicting preferences no longer a problem? Personality-based dynamic clustering for group recommender systems

Abstract

The complexity associated with groups of tourists led to the emergence of Group Recommender Systems (GRS) for tourism. But if generating recommendations for small groups is a complex task, to provide them to large and occasional groups is even more. This complexity is especially due to the group’s heterogeinity, conflicting preferences, the information overload found on the internet and the tourists’ different ways of coping with the information, hindering the recommendation process from the users’ profile construction to the final recommendation of a list of points of interest (POI) to visit. In this work, we show how we tackled the identified issues in a GRS prototype, Grouplanner, including the cold-start problem, by predicting the tourists’ preferences based only on their personality and dividing the main group into subgroups of similar personality; by using a Multi-Agent Microservice; a novel dynamic clustering algorithm, d-means, adapted from the k-means algorithm, that does not need to know the number of clusters a priori; and association rules. Using a personality dataset ofn = 100 k users, the proposed d-means algorithm was tested against two baselines (k-means and k-means++), showing better results in the clustering quality and scalability. We were also able to determine a large set of association rules to refine the recommendations, although further improvements are needed. To test the Grouplanner prototype, a simulation with real users (n = 35) was conducted. The results showed the subgroups formed were very compact, revealing a very good clustering quality, with an average silhouette of s = 0.91. 11 of the 15 proposed tourist preferences were successfully predicted and used for the preliminary recommendation lists, being 92 % of the participants satisfied with the individual recommendations and 96 % with the group recommendations.