Context-Aware Recommendation Methods

A context-aware recommender system attempts to generate better recommendations using contextual information. However, generating recommendations for specific contexts have been challenging because of the difficulties in using contextual information to enhance the capabilities of recommender systems. Several methods have been used to incorporate contextual information into traditional recommendation algorithms and data modeling techniques. These methods focus on incorporating contextual information to improve general recommendations for users rather than identifying the different context applicable to the user and providing recommendations geared towards those specific contexts. We develop two methods: the first method attaches user preference across multiple contextual conditions, assuming that user preference remains the same, but the suitability of items differs across different contextual conditions. The second method assumes that item suitability remains the same across different contextual conditions but user preference changes. We perform some experiments on the last.fm dataset to evaluate our methods. We also compared our work to other context-aware recommendation approaches. Our results show that grouping ratings by context and jointly factorizing with common factors improves prediction accuracy.