BFX: DIAGNOSING CONFLICTING REQUIREMENTS IN CONSTRAINT-BASED RECOMMENDATION

Abstract

When interacting with constraint-based recommender applications, users describe their preferences with the goal of identifying the products that fit their wishes and needs. In such a scenario, users are repeatedly adapting and changing their requirements. As a consequence, situations occur where none of the products completely fulfils the given set of requirements and users need a support in terms of an indicator of minimal sets of requirements that need to be changed in order to be able to find a recommendation. The identification of such minimal sets relies heavily on the existence of (minimal) conflict sets. In this paper we introduce BFX (Boosted FastXplain), a conflict detection algorithm which exploits the basic structural properties of constraint-based recommendation problems. BFX shows a significantly better performance compared to existing conflict detection algorithms. In order to demonstrate the performance of BFX, we report the results of a comparative performance evaluation.