CD-CARS: Cross-domain context-aware recommender systems

Abstract In this paper, we address two research topics in Recommender Systems (RSs) which have been developed in parallel without a deeper integration: Cross-Domain RS (CDRS) and Context-Aware RS (CARS). CDRS have emerged to enhance the quality of recommendations in a target domain by leveraging sources of information in different domains. CDRS are especially useful to address cold-start, sparsity and diversity problems in target domains with scarce information. CARS, on its turn, have been proposed to consider contextual information for recommendations. Such systems are suitable when the users’ interests change according to factors like time, location, among others. By combining these two approaches, better RSs can be developed, considering both the availability of useful data from multiple domains and the use of contextual information. In this paper, we formalize the combination of CDRS and CARS, which represents a more systematic integration of these approaches compared to previous work. Based on this formulation, we developed novel RSs techniques, named CD-CARS. To evaluate the developed CD-CARS techniques, we performed extensive experimentation through real datasets taking into account several scenarios. The recommendations were evaluated in terms of predictive and ranking performance, respectively achieving up to 62.6% and 45%, depending on the scenario, in comparison to traditional cross-domain collaborative filtering techniques. Therefore, the experimental results have shown that the integration of techniques developed in isolation can be useful in a variety of situations, in which recommendations can be improved by information gathered from different sources and can be refined by considering specific contextual information.