Assisting the validity assessment of items based on composition similarity

This paper proposes a method that helps users efficiently judge the validity of items by comparing the composition of these items with those which they trust as being credible standards, where the compositions are sets of factors that comprise the items, their quantities, and their weights. Taking cooking recipes as an example, the proposed method presents relationship between a given recipe and other recipes corresponding to the same dish --- with respect to the expected taste --- by considering the proportion of ingredients in each recipe's composition and comparing them in terms of compositional similarity. The average of other recipes for the same dish which is taken as the given recipe, and the recipe most similar to the average are determined as the recipes to be used for comparison in the method. The experiment --- conducted using data from sites containing recipes posted by cooking teachers and general contributors --- revealed that the proposed method helped users to efficiently grasp whether the given recipe would yield an average-tasting or peculiar-tasting dish, and enabled the easy assessment of its validity with regard to whether the dish is suitable for the individual user.