Diversified utility maximization for recommendations

Consider the problem of recommending items to a group of users subject to the diversity of their tastes. The goal is to recommend a list of items, such that the interests of each user are covered. We cast this problem as maximizing a diversified utility function of the group, the optimal solution of which can be found greedily. We conduct a user study in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Evaluation results show that our method represents an effective strategy compared to various settings in which a convex combination of utility and diversity is maximized.