Context-aware recommender systems

The importance of contextual information has been recognized by researchers and practitioners in many disciplines, including e-commerce personalization, information retrieval, ubiquitous and mobile computing, data mining, marketing, and management. While a substantial amount of research has already been performed in the area of recommender systems, many existing approaches focus on recommending the most relevant items to users without taking into account any additional contextual information, such as time, location, or the company of other people (e.g.,for watching movies or dining out). There is growing understanding that relevant contextual information does matter in recommender systems and that it is important to take this information into account when providing recommendations. We discuss the general notion of context and how it can be modeled in recommender systems. We also discuss three popular algorithmic paradigms—contextual pre-filtering, post-filtering, and modeling—for incorporating contextual information into the recommendation process, and survey recent work on context-aware recommender systems. We also discuss important directions for future research.