Call to order: A hierarchical browsing approach to eliciting users' preference

Abstract

Computing preference queries has received a lot of attention in the database community. It is common that the user is unsure of his/her preference, so care must be taken to elicit the preference of the user correctly. In this paper, we propose to elicit the preferred ordering of a user by utilizing skyline objects as the representatives of the possible ordering. We introduce the notion of order-based representative skylines which selects representatives based on the orderings that they represent. To further facilitate preference exploration, a hierarchical clustering algorithm is applied to compute a denogram on the skyline objects. By coupling the hierarchical clustering with visualization techniques, we allow users to refine their preference weight settings by browsing the hierarchy. Extensive experiments were conducted and the results validate the feasibility and the efficiency of our approach. © 2010 ACM.