Next-App Prediction by Fusing Semantic Information With Sequential Behavior

Next-app prediction is the task of predicting the next app that a user will choose to use on the smartphone. It helps to establish a variety of intelligent personalized services, such as fast-launch UI app, intelligent user-phone interactions, and so on. Since app names only provide limited semantic information, the intrinsic relation among apps cannot be fully exploited. Meanwhile, next-app to be used is largely determined by a sequence of apps that a user used recently. To address these challenging problems, this paper first enriches the semantic information of apps by extracting descriptive text of each app from the app store and thus proposes a topic model to transform apps as well as user preferences into latent vectors. Then, a set of nearest neighbors can be constructed based on the similarity of latent vectors and it is employed for training the prediction model. Furthermore, our prediction scheme is built on the temporal sequential data and is modeled by using the chain-augmented Naive Bayes model. Experimental results with a real smartphone application log data have demonstrated that our method achieves higher recall and DCG values compared with several baseline next-app prediction methods.