Modeling recommendation as a social choice problem

In the classical theory of social choice, a set of voters is called to rank a set of alternatives and a social ranking of the alternatives is generated. In this paper, we model recommendation in the context of browsing systems as a social choice problem, where the set of voters and the set of alternatives both coincide with the set of objects in the data collection. We then propose an importance ranking method that strongly resembles the well known PageRank ranking system, and takes into account both the browsing behavior of the users and the intrinsic features of the objects in the collection. We apply the proposed approach in the context of multimedia browsing systems and show that it can generate effective recommendations and can scale well for large data collections. Copyright 2010 ACM.