Evolutionary Approach for Building, Exploring and Recommending Complex Items With Application in Nutritional Interventions

Over the last few years, the ability of recommender systems to help us in different environments has been increasing. Several systems try to offer solutions in highly complex environments such as nutrition, housing, or traveling. In this paper, we present a recommendation system capable of using different input sources (data and knowledge-based) and producing a complex structured output. We have used an evolutionary approach to combine several unitary items within a flexible structure and have built an initial set of complex configurable items. Then, a content-based approach refines (in terms of preferences) these candidates to offer a final recommendation. We conclude with the application of this approach to the healthy diet recommendation problem, addressing its strengths in this domain.