Context-Aware Collaborative Filtering Using Context Similarity: An Empirical Comparison

Recommender systems can assist with decision-making by delivering a list of item recommendations tailored to user preferences. Context-aware recommender systems additionally consider context information and adapt the recommendations to different situations. A process of context matching, therefore, enables the system to utilize rating profiles in the matched contexts to produce context-aware recommendations. However, it suffers from the sparsity problem since users may not rate items in various context situations. One of the major solutions to alleviate the sparsity issue is measuring the similarity of contexts and utilizing rating profiles with similar contexts to build the recommendation model. In this paper, we summarize the context-aware collaborative filtering methods using context similarity, and deliver an empirical comparison based on multiple context-aware data sets.