A Match-Making System Considering Symmetrical Preferences of Matching Partners

This is a study of match-making systems that considers the mutual satisfaction of matching partners. Recently, recommendation systems have been applied to people recommendation, such as recommending new friends, employees, or dating partners. One of the prominent domain areas is match-making systems that recommend suitable dating partners to customers. A match-making system, however, is different from a product recommender system. First, a match-making system needs to satisfy the recommended partners as well as the customer, whereas a product recommender system only needs to satisfy the customer. Second, match-making systems need to include as many participants in a matching pool as possible for their recommendation results, even with unpopular customers. In other words, recommendations should not be focused only on a limited number of popular people; unpopular people should also be listed on someone else's matching results. In product recommender systems, it is acceptable to recommend the same popular items to many customers, since these items can easily be additionally supplied. However, in match-making systems, there are only a few popular people, and they may become overburdened with too many recommendations. Also, a successful match could cause a customer to drop out of the matching pool. Thus, match-making systems should provide recommendation services equally to all customers without favoring popular customers. The suggested match-making system, called Mutually Beneficial Matching (MBM), considers the reciprocal satisfaction of both the customer and the matched partner and also considers the number of customers who are excluded in the matching. A brief outline of the MBM method is as follows: First, it collects a customer's profile information, his/her preferable dating partner's profile information and the weights that he/she considers important when selecting dating partners. Then, it calculates the preference score of a customer to certain potential dating partners on the basis of the difference between them. The preference score of a certain partner to a customer is also calculated in this way. After that, the mutual preference score is produced by the two preference values calculated in the previous step using the proposed formula in this study. The proposed formula reflects the symmetry of preferences as well as their quantities. Finally, the MBM method recommends the top N partners having high mutual preference scores to a customer. The prototype of the suggested MBM system is implemented by JAVA and applied to an artificial dataset that is based on real survey results from major match-making companies in Korea. The results of the MBM method are compared with those of the other two conventional methods: Preference-Based Matching (PBM), which only considers a customer's preferences, and Arithmetic Mean-Based Matching (AMM), which considers the preferences of both the customer and the partner (although it does not reflect their symmetry in the matching results). We perform the comparisons in terms of criteria such as average preference of the matching partners, average symmetry, and the number of people who are excluded from the matching results by changing the number of recommendations to 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25. The results show that in many cases, the suggested MBM method produces average preferences and symmetries that are significantly higher than those of the PBM and AMM methods. Moreover, in every case, MBM produces a smaller pool of excluded people than those of the PBM method.

상호 대칭적 만족성을 고려한 온라인 데이트시스템

최근 추천시스템에 대한 연구는 고객에게 적합한 상품을 추천하는 것에서 진일보하여, 고객이 선호할만한 친구나 배우자를 추천해주는 인맥 연결분야로 확장되고 있다. 이러한 인맥 연결의 주요한 분야로 미혼남녀를 소개시키는 온라인 데이트시스템을 생각할 수 있다. 본 연구는 사용자에게 적합한 데이트 상대를 추천해주는 온라인 매칭시스템을 제안한다. 제안된 시스템은 기존의 상품추천 시스템과는 다르게, 추천 받는 고객뿐만 아니라, 추천 되는 상대방의 호감도를 함께 고려하여, 양자가 상호 대칭적인 만족도를 갖도록 설계하였다. 또한, 인기인에게 추천이 편중되거나, 비인기인들이 추천에서 소외되지 않고, 시스템 참여자들이 전체적으로 일관된 추천 만족도를 가질 수 있도록 하였다. 본 연구에서 제안한 매칭 시스템은 Mutually Beneficial Matching(MBM) 시스템이라 명명하였으며, 이를 다른 두 일반적인 매칭 기법인 Preference-Based Matching(PBM) 기법 및 Arithmetic Mean-Based Matching(AMM) 기법과 비교하여 성능평가를 수행하였다. 즉, 위의 세 가지 기법을 Java를 사용하여 prototype으로 구현한 후, 가상의 미혼남녀 200명의 데이터에 적용하여 비교 분석하였다. 그 결과, 제안된 MBM 기법이 PBM 및 AMM 기법에 비하여 통계적으로 유의하게 높은 상호호감도(Mutual Preference)를 보임을 알 수 있었고, 호감도의 대칭성(Symmetric Ratio)도 대부분의 경우 높게 도출됨을 확인하였다. 뿐만 아니라, 제안된 MBM 기법은 PBM 기법보다 추천에서 소외된 고객 수(Number of Outsiders)가 적어서, 매칭 pool안의 사용자들에게 전체적으로 호혜적이고 일관된 추천서비스를 제공할 수 있을 것으로 기대된다.