There is significant interest lately in using synthetic data and simulation infrastructures for various types of recommender systems research. However, there are not currently any clear best practices around how best to apply these methods. We proposed a workshop to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in simulating recommender systems and their data to discuss the state of the art of such research and the pressing open methodological questions. The workshop resulted in a report authored by the participants that documents currently-known best practices on which the group has consensus and lays out an agenda for further research over the next 3-5 years to fill in places where we currently lack the information needed to make methodological recommendations.

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This paper reports the findings of the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 17442 on performance modeling and prediction in the domains of Information Retrieval, Natural language Processing and Recommender Systems. We present a framework for further research, which identifies five major problem areas: understanding measures, performance analysis, making underlying assumptions explicit, identifying application features determining performance, and the development of prediction models describing the relationship between assumptions, features and resulting performance.@en