Design guidelines for mobile group recommender systems to handle inaccurate or missing location data

Abstract

Today's group recommender systems do not consider unavailable, inaccessible, or incomplete user information of one ore more members within a group. This is a problem for mobile group recommender system, because changed user behaviour or technical limitations of mobile services let user may not be willing or able to disclose all information, which are part of a user profile in a mobile environment. For location information, as one of the most important type of user information for an ad-hoc mobile recommendation service, this can lead to inaccurate, or missing location information. Inaccurate or missing location information has an impact on different parts of building group recommendations. This impact reduces the quality of recommendations, which is a key-challenge of recommender systems. Therefore, design guidelines are needed to address the problem of missing or inaccurate location information in mobile group recommender systems. This work describes the approach of building and validating those design guidelines and gives a first idea of impacts.