Application of choice models in tourism recommender systems

Choice models (CM) are proposed in the field of tourism recommender systems (TRS) with the aim of providing algorithms with both a theoretical understanding of tourist's motivations and a certain degree of transparency. The goal of this work is to overcome some of the limitations of current state-of-art algorithms used in TRSs by providing: (1) accurate preferences, which are learnt from user choices rather than from ratings, and (2) interpretable coefficients, which are achieved by means of the set of estimated parameters of CM. The study was carried out with a gastronomic data set generated in an ecological experiment in the tourism domain. The performance of CM has been compared with a set of baseline algorithms (rating-based and ensembles) by using two evaluation metrics: precision and DCG. The CM outperformed the baseline algorithms when the size of the choice set was limited. The findings suggest that CM may provide an optimal trade-off between theoretical soundness, interpretability and performance in the field of TRS.