A Hybrid Context Aware Recommender System with Combined Pre and Post-Filter Approach

The domain of context aware recommender approaches has made substantial advancement over the last decade, but many applications still do not include contextual information while providing recommendations. Contextual information is crucial for various application areas and should not be ignored. There are generally three algorithms which can be used to include context and those are: pre-filter approach, post-filter approach, and contextual modeling. Each of the algorithms has their own drawbacks. The proposed approach modifies the post filter approach to rectify its shortcomings and combines it with the pre-filter approach based on the importance of contextual attribute provided by the user. The results of experimental setup also demonstrate that the proposed system improves the precision and ranking of the recommendations provided to user. With the help of this hybrid approach, the proposed system eliminates the problem of sparsity which is present in the pre-filter algorithm, and has performance improvement over the traditional post-filter approach.