A Heuristic Approach for Context-Aware Recommendation Using Rough Set Theory

Context-aware recommender systems, aiming to further improve performance accuracy and user satisfaction by fully utilizing contextual information, have recently become one of the hottest topics in the domain of recommender systems. However, not all contextual information might be relevant or useful for recommendation purposes, and little work has been done on measuring how important the contextual information for recommendation. We propose a heuristic optimization algorithm based on rough set theory and collaborative filtering to using contextual information more efficiently for boosting recommendation. Our approach involves three processes. First, significant attributes to represent contextual information are extracted and measured to identify recommended items using rough set theory. Second, the user similarity is evaluated in a target context consideration. Third, collaborative filtering is applied to recommend appropriate items. We perform an empirical comparison of three approaches on two real-world data sets. The experimental results show that the proposed approach generates more accurate predictions.