Differential Context Relaxation for Context-Aware Travel Recommendation

Context-aware recommendation (CARS) has been shown to be an effective approach to recommendation in a number of domains. However, the problem of identifying appropriate contextual variables remains: using too many contextual variables risks a drastic increase in dimensionality and a loss of accuracy in recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel treatment of context – identifying influential contexts for different algorithm components instead of for the whole algorithm. Based on this idea, we take traditional user-based collaborative filtering (CF) as an example, decompose it into three context-sensitive components, and propose a hybrid contextual approach. We then identify appropriate relaxations of contextual constraints for each algorithm component. The effectiveness of context relaxation is demonstrated by comparison of three algorithms using a travel data set: a contenxt-ignorant approach, contextual pre-filtering, and our hybrid contextual algorithm. The experiments show that choosing an appropriate relaxation of the contextual constraints for each component of an algorithm outperforms strict application of the context.