"Please, Not Now!": A Model for Timing Recommendations

Proactive recommender systems push recommendations to users without their explicit request whenever a recommendation that suits a user is available. These systems strive to optimize the match between recommended items and users' preferences. We assume that recommendations might be reflected with low accuracy not only due to the recommended items' suitability to the user, but also because of the recommendations' timings. We therefore claim that it is possible to learn a model of good and bad contexts for recommendations that can later be integrated in a recommender system. Using mobile data collected during a three week user study, we suggest a two-phase model that is able to classify whether a certain context is at all suitable for any recommendation, regardless of its content. Results reveal that a hybrid model that first decides whether it should use a personal or a non-personal timing model, and then classifies accordingly whether the timing is proper for recommendations, is superior to both the personal or non-personal timing models.