CD-cars: cross domain context-aware recomender systems

• Main Author: SILVA, Douglas Véras e
• Publication Date: 2016
• Format: Doctoral thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositório Institucional da UFPE
• Download full: https://repositorio.ufpe.br/handle/123456789/18356
• topic: Recomendação de Domínio Cruzado; Recomendação Sensível a Contexto; Filtragem Colaborativa; Recomendação de Domínio Cruzado Sensível a Contexto; Cross-domain Recommendation; Context-Aware Recommendation; Collaborative Filtering Recommendation; Cross-Domain Context-Aware Recommendation

Traditionally, single-domain recommender systems (SDRS) have achieved good results in recommending relevant items for users in order to solve the information overload problem. However, cross-domain recommender systems (CDRS) have emerged aiming to enhance SDRS by achieving some goals such as accuracy improvement, diversity, addressing new user and new item problems, among others. Instead of treating each domain independently, CDRS use knowledge acquired in a source domain (e.g. books) to improve the recommendation in a target domain (e.g. movies). Likewise SDRS research, collaborative filtering (CF) is considered the most popular and widely adopted approach in CDRS, because its implementation for any domain is relatively simple. In addition, its quality of recommendation is usually higher than that of content-based filtering (CBF) algorithms. In fact, the majority of the cross-domain collaborative filtering RS (CD-CFRS) can give better recommendations in comparison to single domain collaborative filtering recommender systems (SD-CFRS), leading to a higher users’ satisfaction and addressing cold-start, sparsity, and diversity problems. However, CD-CFRS may not necessarily be more accurate than SD-CFRS. On the other hand, context-aware recommender systems (CARS) deal with another relevant topic of research in the recommender systems area, aiming to improve the quality of recommendations too. Different contextual information (e.g., location, time, mood, etc.) can be leveraged in order to provide recommendations that are more suitable and accurate for a user depending on his/her context. In this way, we believe that the integration of techniques developed in isolation (cross-domain and contextaware) can be useful in a variety of situations, in which recommendations can be improved by information from different sources as well as they can be refined by considering specific contextual information. In this thesis, we define a novel formulation of the recommendation problem, considering both the availability of information from different domains (source and target) and the use of contextual information. Based on this formulation, we propose the integration of cross-domain and context-aware approaches for a novel recommender system (CD-CARS). To evaluate the proposed CD-CARS, we performed experimental evaluations through two real datasets with three different contextual dimensions and three distinct domains. The results of these evaluations have showed that the use of context-aware techniques can be considered as a good approach in order to improve the cross-domain recommendation quality in comparison to traditional CD-CFRS.