Mobile Context-Aware Recommender Systems can be naturally modelled as an exploration exploitation trade-off (exr exp) problem, where the system has to choose between maximizing its expected rewards dealing with its current knowledge (exploitation) and learning more about the unknown user's preferences to improve its knowledge (exploration). This problem has been addressed by the reinforcement learning community but they do not consider the risk level of the current user's situation, where it may be dangerous to recommend items the user may not desire in her current situation if the risk level is high. We introduce in this paper an algorithm named R-UCB that considers the risk level of the user's situation to adaptively balance between exr and exp. The detailed analysis of the experimental results reveals several important discoveries in the exr exp behaviour.
In @cite_16 the authors propose a mobile recommender system for people in leisure time. The system predicts the current activity (eating,reading or shopping) from the context (time, location) and the behaviour of the user. The predicted activity combined with preference models of the user, are used to filter and recommend relevant content. To provide relevant advertisements to mobile users, authors in @cite_15 build a profile of each region visited by the user. Statistical techniques are then used to extract information from the visited regions, like "the frequency of visits", "duration and time of typical visits", and the user's profile is built on the basis of questionnaires.
@cite_15 @cite_16
2131795689 2056102005
This paper describes a novel approach for gathering profile information about mobile phone users. The focus is on information that can be used to enhance targeting of advertisements. (The ads might be delivered into the mobile phones, or to other devices such as the user's IPTV.) Unlike previous approaches, we use a two-tiered approach for learning end-user habits and preferences. In this approach the first tier involves statistical learning from network observable data (in the current paper, primarily logs of cell towers visited), and the second tier involves explicit queries to the user (in the current paper, to ask, e.g., what kinds of activities the user does in a given region that he frequents). The user might be willing to answer occasional queries of this sort through offers of service discounts, or to be able to receive more relevant ads. The paper focuses on two key aspects of our approach, which correspond to how the two tiers are instantiated in the current version of the prototype system that we have developed at Bell Labs. The first concerns the statistical techniques used to determine information about regions visited, along with the frequency of visits, typical durations, and typical visit times. These techniques were developed based on a training set consisting of logs of 6 users with mobile devices over a period of several months. The techniques address issues that arise when a given small region is serviced by multiple cell towers (in which case oscillations between cell towers can be confused with movement between regions). The second key aspect concerns optimizing the order in which queries are presented to users, in a context where different query answers have different value for the advertising process. (The values of answers might be influenced by the mix of advertising campaigns from which ads are to be matched against users.) Optimization is NP-complete in a relatively general context. We develop a polynomial time algorithm which yields optimal sequences for the case where the family of queries to be asked satisfies a tree-based property. This is extended to create a heuristic polynomial time algorithm for the general case. Location-sharing services such as Foursquare provide a rich source of information about the visits of users to locations. In the case of Foursquare, users voluntarily ‘check in’ to places they visit using a mobile application. An analysis of these data may reveal differences in users personality in terms of their mobility habits, preferred places, and action and location patterns. This knowledge about user behaviour can be used, in addition to information about their preferences, to improve current recommendation systems for mobile platforms. User behaviour targeting is essential in online advertising. Compared with sponsored search keyword targeting and contextual advertising page content targeting, user behaviour targeting builds users’ interest profiles via tracking their online behaviour and then delivers the relevant ads according to each user’s interest, which leads to higher targeting accuracy and thus more improved advertising performance. The current user profiling methods include building keywords and topic tags or mapping users onto a hierarchical taxonomy. However, to our knowledge, there is no previous work that explicitly investigates the user online visits similarity and incorporates such similarity into their ad response prediction. In this work, we propose a general framework which learns the user profiles based on their online browsing behaviour, and transfers the learned knowledge onto prediction of their ad response. Technically, we propose a transfer learning model based on the probabilistic latent factor graphic models, where the users’ ad response profiles are generated from their online browsing profiles. The large-scale experiments based on real-world data demonstrate significant improvement of our solution over some strong baselines. The prevalence of smartphones and mobile social networks allow the users to share their location-based life experience much easier. The large amount of data generated in related location-based social networks provides informative cues on user's behaviors and preferences to support personalized location-based services, like point-of-interest (POI) recommendation. Yet achieving accurate personalized POI recommendation is challenging as the data available for each user is highly sparse. In addition, the computational complexity is high due to the large number of users. In this paper, a novel methodology for personalized successive POI recommendation is proposed. First, the preferred successive category of location is predicted using a third-rank tensor computed based on the partially observed transitions between the categories of user's successive locations where the missing transitions are uncovered by inferring the group preference. The group is achieved according to users' demographics and frequently visited locations. Then, a bipartite graph is constructed based on the recommended categories for each user. To obtain the personalized ranking of locations, a distance weighted HITS algorithm is proposed so that the location authority score is updated iteratively according to the visiting frequency of the group and some distance constraints. The proposed two-step approach with the category prediction incorporated aims to boost the location prediction performance via the smoothing and at the same time reduce the complexity. Experimental results obtained based on the real-world location-based social network data show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.