Influence of rating prediction on group recommendation's accuracy

Recommender systems suggest items that might be interesting to a user. To achieve this, rating prediction is the main form of information processing that these systems perform. This article tackles the problem of predicting ratings in a group recommender system by analyzing how system accuracy is influenced by the choice of prediction approach and by a solution that employs the predicted values to avoid data sparsity. The results of more than 100 experiments show that by predicting the ratings for individual users instead of predicting them for groups, and by using these predictions in a system's group detection task, accuracy increases and problems caused by data sparsity are reduced.