Predicting Group Choices from Group Profiles

Abstract

Group recommender systems (GRSs) identify items to recommend to a group of people by aggregating group members’ individual preferences into a group profile and selecting the items that have the largest score in the group profile. The GRS predicts that these recommendations would be chosen by the group by assuming that the group is applying the same preference aggregation strategy as the one adopted by the GRS. However, predicting the choice of a group is more complex since the GRS is not aware of the exact preference aggregation strategy that is going to be used by the group. To this end, the aim of this article is to validate the research hypothesis that, by using a machine learning approach and a dataset of observed group choices, it is possible to predict a group’s final choice better than by using a standard preference aggregation strategy. Inspired by the Decision Scheme theory, which first tried to address the group choice prediction problem, we search for a group profile definition that, in conjunction with a machine learning model, can be used to accurately predict a group choice. Moreover, to cope with the data scarcity problem, we propose two data augmentation methods, which add synthetic group profiles to the training data, and we hypothesize that they can further improve the choice prediction accuracy. We validate our research hypotheses by using a dataset containing 282 participants organized in 79 groups. The experiments indicate that the proposed method outperforms baseline aggregation strategies when used for group choice prediction. The method we propose is robust with the presence of missing preference data and achieves a performance superior to what humans can achieve on the group choice prediction task. Finally, the proposed data augmentation method can also improve the prediction accuracy. Our approach can be exploited in novel GRSs to identify the items that the group is likely to choose and to help groups to make even better and fairer choices.