The majority of recommender systems are designed to recommend items (such as movies and products) to users. We focus on the problem of recommending buyers to sellers which comes with new challenges: (1) constraints on the number of recommendations buyers are part of before they become overwhelmed, (2) constraints on the number of recommendations sellers receive within their budget, and (3) constraints on the set of buyers that sellers want to receive (e.g., no more than two people from the same household). We propose the following critical problems of recommending buyers to sellers: Constrained Recommendation (C-REC) capturing the first two challenges, and Conflict-Aware Constrained Recommendation (CAC-REC) capturing all three challenges at the same time. We show that C-REC can be modeled using linear programming and can be efficiently solved using modern solvers. On the other hand, we show that CAC-REC is NP-hard. We propose two approximate algorithms to solve CAC-REC and show that they achieve close to optimal solutions via comprehensive experiments using real-world datasets.
Classical recommender systems provide users with a list of recommendations where each recommendation consists of a single item, e.g., a book or DVD. However, several applications can benefit from a system capable of recommending packages of items, in the form of sets. Sample applications include travel planning with a limited budget (price or time) and twitter users wanting to select worthwhile tweeters to follow given that they can deal with only a bounded number of tweets. In these contexts, there is a need for a system that can recommend top-k packages for the user to choose from. Motivated by these applications, we consider composite recommendations, where each recommendation comprises a set of items. Each item has both a value (rating) and a cost associated with it, and the user specifies a maximum total cost (budget) for any recommended set of items. Our composite recommender system has access to one or more component recommender system, focusing on different domains, as well as to information sources which can provide the cost associated with each item. Because the problem of generating the top recommendation (package) is NP-complete, we devise several approximation algorithms for generating top-k packages as recommendations. We analyze their efficiency as well as approximation quality. Finally, using two real and two synthetic data sets, we subject our algorithms to thorough experimentation and empirical analysis. Our findings attest to the efficiency and quality of our approximation algorithms for top-k packages compared to exact algorithms.