Context Recommendation Using Multi-label Classification

Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) are extensions of traditional recommenders that also take into account contextual condition of a user to whom a recommendation is made. The recommendation problem is, however, still focused on recommending a set of items to a target user. In this paper, we consider the problem of recommending to a user the appropriate contexts in which an item should be selected. We believe that context recommenders can be used as another set of tools to assist users' decision making. We formulate the context recommendation problem and discuss the motivation behind and possible applications of the concept. We identify two general classes of algorithms to solve this problem: direct context prediction and indirect context recommendation. Furthermore, we present and evaluate several direct context prediction algorithms based on multi-label classification (MLC). Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approaches outperform the baseline methods, and also that personalization is required to enhance the effectiveness of context recommenders.