A Consensus-Driven Group Recommender System

Recommender systems aim at filtering large amounts of information for users, providing them with those pieces of information which better meet their preferences or needs. Such systems have been traditionally used in diverse areas, such as e-commerce or tourism. Within this context, group recommender systems address the problem of generating recommendations for groups of users who might have different interests. Although different aggregation processes have been extensively utilized in real-life applications to generate group recommendations, such processes do not guarantee that the list of products recommended to the group reflect a high agreement level among its members' individual preferences. Given the need for considering the added value of obtaining group recommendations under a high agreement level, this paper presents a novel group recommender system methodology that attempts to reach a high level of consensus among individual recommendations of group members. To do this, and inspired by existing group decision-making approaches in the literature, a consensus reaching process is carried out to bring such individual recommendations closer to each other before delivering the group recommendations. (C) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.