SmarterDeals: a context-aware deal recommendation system based on the smartercontext engine

Daily-deal applications are popular implementations of on-line advertising strategies that offer products and services to users based on their personal profiles. The current implementations are effective but can frustrate users with irrelevant deals due to stale profiles. To exploit these applications fully, deals must become smarter and context-aware. This paper presents SmarterDeals, our deal recommendation system that exploits users’ changing personal context information to deliver highly relevant offers. SmarterDeals relies on recommendation algorithms based on collaborative filtering, and SmarterContext, our adaptive context management framework. SmarterContext provides SmarterDeals with up-to-date information about users’ locations and product preferences gathered from their past and present web interactions. For many deal categories the accuracy of SmarterDeals is between 3% and 8% better than the approaches we used as baselines. For some categories, and in terms of multiplicative relative performance, SmarterDeals outperforms related approaches by as much as 173.4%, and 37.5% on average. Copyright © 2012 Sahar Ebrahimi, Norha M. Villegas, Hausi A. Müller, and Alex Thomo. Permission to copy is hereby granted provided the original copyright notice is reproduced in copies made.