The Impact of Situation Clustering in Contextual-Bandit Algorithm for Context-Aware Recommender Systems
This addresses the problem of dynamic user content for recommender system developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing contextual bandit methods.
The paper tackled user content dynamicity in context-aware recommender systems by modeling them as a contextual bandit algorithm with situation clustering, resulting in improved precision as shown in evaluations with real online event log data.
Most existing approaches in Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CRS) focus on recommending relevant items to users taking into account contextual information, such as time, location, or social aspects. However, few of them have considered the problem of user's content dynamicity. We introduce in this paper an algorithm that tackles the user's content dynamicity by modeling the CRS as a contextual bandit algorithm and by including a situation clustering algorithm to improve the precision of the CRS. Within a deliberately designed offline simulation framework, we conduct evaluations with real online event log data. The experimental results and detailed analysis reveal several important discoveries in context aware recommender system.