Title
A novel framework to alleviate the sparsity problem in context-aware recommender systems
Abstract
AbstractRecommender systems have become indispensable for services in the era of big data. To improve accuracy and satisfaction, context-aware recommender systems CARSs attempt to incorporate contextual information into recommendations. Typically, valid and influential contexts are determined in advance by domain experts or feature selection approaches. Most studies have focused on utilizing the unitary context due to the differences between various contexts. Meanwhile, multi-dimensional contexts will aggravate the sparsity problem, which means that the user preference matrix would become extremely sparse. Consequently, there are not enough or even no preferences in most multi-dimensional conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to alleviate the sparsity issue for CARSs, especially when multi-dimensional contextual variables are adopted. Motivated by the intuition that the overall preferences tend to show similarities among specific groups of users and conditions, we first explore to construct one contextual profile for each contextual condition. In order to further identify those user and context subgroups automatically and simultaneously, we apply a co-clustering algorithm. Furthermore, we expand user preferences in a given contextual condition with the identified user and context clusters. Finally, we perform recommendations based on expanded preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1080/13614568.2016.1152319
Periodicals
Keywords
Field
DocType
Context-aware recommender system,data sparsity,co-clustering,preference expansion
Recommender system,Contextual information,Feature selection,Computer science,Intuition,Unitary state,Artificial intelligence,Biclustering,Big data,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
23
2
1361-4568
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
16
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Penghua Yu172.87
Lanfen Lin27824.70
Jing Wang372.53