Patent Document ID: 7904530
Application ID: 12021623

Base Claim:
1. A method for automatically incorporating hypothetical context information into recommendations, the method comprising: receiving a request from a user for one or more recommendations; receiving a current context associated with the request; determining a hypothetical context for the request; wherein the hypothetical context is determined from the current context; wherein the hypothetical context comprises one or more future times and/or one or more future locations associated with the user; and wherein a respective hypothetical context contains a joint distribution over one or more contextual variables which can have discrete values, continuous values, and/or a combination of discrete and continuous values; wherein determining the respective hypothetical context involves estimating a distribution over locations, estimating a distribution over time, and estimating the joint distribution based on the location distribution and time distribution; determining one or more recommendations for the user based on the hypothetical context; and returning the one or more recommendations to the user.

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Claim 4:
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein determining a respective hypothetical context can involve: determining a distribution over weather conditions for the distribution over locations and the distribution over time; determining a distribution over context-related preferences; and/or determining a distribution over conditions related to the hypothetical context that may be inferred from publicly-available data about the distribution over other contextual variables.