Incorporating Contextual Information into Personalized Mobile Applications Recommendation

With the rise of the mobile Internet, the number of mobile applications (apps) has shown explosive growth, which directly leads to the apps data overload. Currently, the recommender system has become the most effective method to solve the app data overload. However, most of the existing recommended methods for apps ignore the app functional exclusiveness features, which makes it difficult to further improve the app recommendation performance. To solve this problem, we propose a personalized context-aware mobile app recommendation approach, called PCMARA. Specifically, (1) PCMARA explores the relationship between contextual information and function of apps and constructs the app contextual factors for app which represent the function of app. (2) PCMARA leverages the app contextual factor to design a novel app similarity model, which enable to effectively eliminate the adverse effects that ignore the app functional exclusiveness. (3) PCMARA comprehensively considers the contextual information of users and apps to generate a recommendation list for users based on the target users’ current time and location. We applied the PCMARA to a real-world dataset and conducted a large-scale recommendation effect experiment. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of PMARA over the benchmark methods.