A restaurant recommendation approach with the contextual information

Abstract

Recommender systems can recommend products by analyzing the interests and habits of users. To make more efficient recommendation, the contextual information should be collected in recommendation algorithms. In the restaurant recommendation, the location and the current time of customers should also be considered to facilitate restaurants to find potential customers and give accurate and timely recommendations. However, the existing recommendation approaches often lack the consideration of the influence of time and location. Besides, the data sparsity is an inherent problem in the collaborative filtering algorithm. To address these problems, this paper proposes a recommendation approach which combines the contextual information including time, price and location. Instead of constructing the user-restaurant scoring matrix, the proposed approach clusters price tags and generates the user-price scoring matrix to alleviate the sparsity of data. The experiment on Foursquare dataset shows that the proposed approach has a better performance than traditional ones.