Towards Similarity-Aware Constraint-Based Recommendation

Constraint-based recommender systems help users to identify useful objects and services based on a given set of constraints. These decision support systems are often applied in complex domains where millions of possible recommendations exist. One major challenge of constraint-based recommenders is the identification of recommendations which are similar to the user’s requirements. Especially, in cases where the user requirements are inconsistent with the underlying constraint set, constraint-based recommender systems have to identify and apply the most suitable diagnosis in order to identify a recommendation and to increase the user’s satisfaction with the recommendation. Given this motivation, we developed two different approaches which provide similar recommendations to users based on their requirements even when the user’s preferences are inconsistent with the underlying constraint set. We tested our approaches with two real-world datasets and evaluated them with respect to the runtime performance and the degree of similarity between the original requirements and the identified recommendation. The results of our evaluation show that both approaches are able to identify recommendations of similar solutions in a highly efficient manner.