A Composite Recommendation System for Planning Tourist Visits
Résumé
Classical recommender systems provide users with
ranked lists of recommendations that are relevant to their
preferences. Each recommendation consists of a single item,
e.g., a movie or a book. However, these ranked lists are not
suitable for applications such as travel planning, which deal
with heterogeneous items. In fact, in such applications, there is
a need to recommend packages the user can choose from, each
package being a set of Points of Interest (POIs), e.g., museums,
parks, monuments, etc. In this paper, we focus on the problem of
recommending a set of packages to the user, where each package
is constituted with a set of POIs that may constitute a tour.
Given a collection of POIs, where each POI has a cost and a
time associated with it, and the user specifying a maximum total
value for both the cost and the time (budgets), our goal is to
recommend the most interesting packages for the user, where
each package satisfies the budget constraints. We formally define
the problem and we present a novel composite recommendation
system, inspired from composite retrieval. We introduce a scoring
function and propose a ranking algorithm that takes into account
the preferences of the user, the diversity of POIs included in
the package, as well as the popularity of POIs in the package.
Extensive experimental evaluation of our proposed system, using
a real dataset demonstrates its quality and its ability to improve
both diversity and relevance of recommendations.