Improving package recommendations through query relaxation
Matteo Brucato, Azza Abouzied, Alexandra Meliou · 2014
Recommendation systems aim to identify items that are likely to be of interest to users. In many cases, users are interested in package recommendations as collections of items. For example, a dietitian may wish to derive a dietary plan as a collection of recipes that is nutritionally balanced, and a travel agent may want to produce a vacation package as a coordinated collection of travel and hotel reservations. Recent work has explored extending recommendation systems to support packages of items. These systems need to solve complex combinatorial problems, enforcing various properties and constraints defined on sets of items. Introducing constraints on packages makes recommendation queries harder to evaluate, but also harder to express: Queries that are under-specified produce too many answers, whereas queries that are over-specified frequently miss interesting solutions.