Patent attributes
A personal taste assessment system recommends and predicts a person's preference for a consumable or other item. The system accesses a user profile for a person. The user profile includes a preference model representing associations between the person's ratings of items and a set of item characteristics. The system also accesses a database of characteristic values for a group of items, uses the identifying information to identify a candidate item having characteristic values whose properties match characteristics associated with the rated items that the person found to be appealing, and processes the characteristic values of the candidate item with the user profile to generate a predicted rating as a prediction of how the person would rate the identified candidate item. The system then causes an electronic device to output an identification of the candidate item and the predicted rating.