What and who with: A social approach to double-sided recommendation

Our data show that users consider double-sided recommendations more useful than traditional recommendations which provide equivalent information. It was observed that our “social” DSR algorithm performs better in the event recommendation domain than a content-based one which has already been recognised as providing a good performance, in terms of precision, recall, accuracy and F1. This result is strengthened by our demonstrating that the good performance DSRs provide also depends on their peculiar structure and not only on the fact that they include “social” information. The item-recommendation part also performed better than a user-based collaborative filtering algorithm. Lastly, we found that users' scores for recommended item-group packages can be better predicted by considering only the system scores for the recommended groups, at least in the domain of social and cultural events.