A Comparative Study of Rank Aggregation Methods in Recommendation Systems

Abstract

The aim of a recommender system is to suggest to the user certain products or services that most likely will interest them. Within the context of personalized recommender systems, a number of algorithms have been suggested to generate a ranking of items tailored to individual user preferences. However, these algorithms do not generate identical recommendations, and for this reason it has been suggested in the literature that the results of these algorithms can be combined using aggregation techniques, hoping that this will translate into an improvement in the quality of the final recommendation. In order to see which of these techniques increase the quality of recommendations to the greatest extent, the authors of this publication conducted experiments in which they considered five recommendation algorithms and 20 aggregation methods. The research was carried out on the popular and publicly available MovieLens 100k and MovieLens 1M datasets, and the results were confirmed by statistical tests.