Preference elicitation refers to the problem of developing a
decision support system
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and h ...
capable of generating
recommendations
A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing 'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that provide suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular u ...
to a user, thus assisting in decision making. It is important for such a system to model user's preferences accurately, find hidden preferences and avoid redundancy. This problem is sometimes studied as a computational learning theory problem. Another approach for formulating this problem is a
partially observable Markov decision process
A partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a generalization of a Markov decision process (MDP). A POMDP models an agent decision process in which it is assumed that the system dynamics are determined by an MDP, but the agent cannot ...
. The formulation of this problem is also dependent upon the context of the area in which it is studied.
Overview
With the explosion of on-line information new opportunities for finding and using electronic data have been generated, these changes have also brought the task of eliciting useful information to the forefront. Researchers as well as major online catalog companies have come up with algorithms and
prototype
A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...
s of systems that can aid a user to be able to navigate through a complex and huge information space using some information from the user in the form of answers to certain queries or ratings to certain items etc. depending upon the domain of the information space.
See also
*
Cold start
*
Collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...
*
Collective intelligence
Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, politic ...
*
Long tail
In statistics and business, a long tail of some probability distribution, distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. The distribution could involv ...
*
Personalized marketing
Personalized marketing, also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing, is a marketing strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to current or pr ...
*
Product finder
Product finders are information systems that help consumers to identify products within a large palette of similar alternative products. Product finders differ in complexity, the more complex among them being a special case of decision support sy ...
s
*
Revealed preference
Revealed preference theory, pioneered by economist Paul Anthony Samuelson in 1938, is a method of analyzing choices made by individuals, mostly used for comparing the influence of policies on consumer behavior. Revealed preference models assume t ...
External links
Special Issue on Preferences. AI Magazine Vol 29, No 4: Winter 2008{{Recommender systems
Decision support systems
Information systems