Multi-Objective Optimization and Recommendations

Abstract

Recommender systems have been widely applied to several domains and applications. Traditional recommender systems usually deal with a single objective, such as minimizing the prediction errors or maximizing the ranking of the recommendation list. There is an emerging demand for multi-objective optimization so that the development of recommendation models can take multiple objectives into consideration.

Currently, the multi-objective optimization methodologies have been well developed, and they have been reused in the area of recommender systems. This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive introduction of the multi-objective optimization and the multi-objective recommender systems. More specifically, we identify the circumstances in which a multi-objective recommender system could be useful, summarize the methodologies and evaluation approaches in these systems, point out existing problems by a critical analysis, and provide guidelines for the usage of multi-objective optimization in recommender systems.