Recommender systems (RS) help users to find their appropriate items among large volumes of information. Among the different types of RS, context-aware recommender systems aim at personalizing as much as possible the recommendations based on the context situation in which the user is. In this paper we present an approach integrating contextual information into the recommendation process by modeling either item-based or user-based influence of the context on ratings, using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient. The proposed solution aims at taking advantage of content and contextual information in the recommendation process. We evaluate and show effectiveness of our approach on three different contextual datasets and analyze the performances of the variants of our approach based on the characteristics of these datasets, especially the sparsity level of the input data and amount of available information.
@cite_26: The article presents a multidimensional (MD) approach to recommender systems that can provide recommendations based on additional contextual information besides the typical information on users and items used in most of the current recommender systems. This approach supports multiple dimensions, profiling information, and hierarchical aggregation of recommendations. The article also presents a multidimensional rating estimation method capable of selecting two-dimensional segments of ratings pertinent to the recommendation context and applying standard collaborative filtering or other traditional two-dimensional rating estimation techniques to these segments. A comparison of the multidimensional and two-dimensional rating estimation approaches is made, and the tradeoffs between the two are studied. Moreover, the article introduces a combined rating estimation method, which identifies the situations where the MD approach outperforms the standard two-dimensional approach and uses the MD approach in those situations and the standard two-dimensional approach elsewhere. Finally, the article presents a pilot empirical study of the combined approach, using a multidimensional movie recommender system that was developed for implementing this approach and testing its performance.
@cite_28: Research in context-aware recommender systems (CARS) usually requires the identification of the influential contextual variables in advance. In collaborative recommendation, there is a substantial trade-off between applying context very strictly and achieving good coverage and accuracy. Our prior work showed that this tradeoff can be managed by applying the contexts differentially in different components of the recommendation algorithm. In this paper, we extend our previous model and show that our differential context relaxation (DCR) model can also be used to identify demographic and item features that are linked to the contexts. We also demonstrate the application of binary particle swarm optimization as a scalable optimization technique for deriving the optimal relaxation.
@cite_1: Context-aware recommender systems improve context-free recommenders by exploiting the knowledge of the contextual situation under which a user experienced and rated an item. They use data sets of contextually-tagged ratings to predict how the target user would evaluate (rate) an item in a given contextual situation, with the ultimate goal to recommend the items with the best estimated ratings. This paper describes and evaluates a pre-filtering approach to context-aware recommendation, called distributional-semantics pre-filtering (DSPF), which exploits in a novel way the distributional semantics of contextual conditions to build more precise context-aware rating prediction models. In DSPF, given a target contextual situation (of a target user), a matrix-factorization predictive model is built by using the ratings tagged with the contextual situations most similar to the target one. Then, this model is used to compute rating predictions and identify recommendations for that specific target contextual situation. In the proposed approach, the definition of the similarity of contextual situations is based on the distributional semantics of their composing conditions: situations are similar if they influence the user's ratings in a similar way. This notion of similarity has the advantage of being directly derived from the rating data; hence it does not require a context taxonomy. We analyze the effectiveness of DSPF varying the specific method used to compute the situation-to-situation similarity. We also show how DSPF can be further improved by using clustering techniques. Finally, we evaluate DSPF on several contextually-tagged data sets and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art context-aware approaches.
@cite_15: A novel algorithm for decoding a general rate K Nconvolutional code based on recurrent neural network (RNN) is described and analysed. The algorithm is introduced by outlining the mathematical models of the encoder and decoder. A number of strategies for optimising the iterative decoding process are proposed, and a simulator was also designed in order to compare the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the RNN decoder with the conventional decoder that is based on Viterbi Algorithm (VA). The simulation results show that this novel algorithm can achieve the same bit error rate and has a lower decoding complexity. Most importantly this algorithm allows parallel signal processing, which increases the decoding speed and accommodates higher data rate transmission. These characteristics are inherited from a neural network structure of the decoder and the iterative nature of the algorithm, that outperform the conventional VA algorithm.
@cite_10: 
@cite_12: 
In approaches, contextual information is used to select only appropriate data for the target user's context situation, and then a traditional recommendation technique is applied on this selection. Numerous approaches have been proposed in this category. We can mention: the approach @cite_26 , with its two variants and ; the splitting approaches: @cite_12 , @cite_15 and @cite_10 ; the approach, and its two variants (DCR) and (DCW), proposed in @cite_28 ; and the approach @cite_1 .