Title
Reciprocal Recommender Systems: Analysis of state-of-art literature, challenges and opportunities towards social recommendation
Abstract
There exist situations of decision-making under information overload in the Internet, where people have an overwhelming number of available options to choose from, e.g. products to buy in an e-commerce site, or restaurants to visit in a large city. Recommender systems arose as a data-driven personalized decision support tool to assist users in these situations: they are able to process user-related data, filtering and recommending items based on the user’s preferences, needs and/or behavior. Unlike most conventional recommender approaches where items are inanimate entities recommended to the users and success is solely determined upon the end user’s reaction to the recommendation(s) received, in a Reciprocal Recommender System (RRS) users become the item being recommended to other users. Hence, both the end user and the user being recommended should accept the “matching” recommendation to yield a successful RRS performance. The operation of an RRS entails not only predicting accurate preference estimates upon user interaction data as classical recommenders do, but also calculating mutual compatibility between (pairs of) users, typically by applying fusion processes on unilateral user-to-user preference information. This paper presents a snapshot-style analysis of the extant literature that summarizes the state-of-the-art RRS research to date, focusing on the algorithms, fusion processes and fundamental characteristics of RRS, both inherited from conventional user-to-item recommendation models and those inherent to this emerging family of approaches. Representative RRS models are likewise highlighted. Following this, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for future research on RRSs, with special focus on (i) fusion strategies to account for reciprocity and (ii) emerging application domains related to social recommendation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.inffus.2020.12.001
Information Fusion
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Recommender systems,Reciprocal Recommender Systems,Preference fusion,Online dating,Social matching,Social networks
Journal
69
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1566-2535
3
0.86
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ivan Palomares119911.40
Carlos Porcel245024.12
Luiz Pizzato331.88
Ido Guy4144485.72
Enrique Herrera-Viedma531.20