A Multidimensional Approach for Context-aware Recommendation in Mobile Commerce

Context as the dynamic information describing the situation of items and users and affecting the user’s decision process is essential to be used by recommender systems in mobile commerce to guarantee the quality of recommendation. This paper proposes a novel multidimensional approach for contextaware recommendation in mobile commerce. The approach represents users, items, context information and the relationship between them in a multidimensional space. It then determines the usage patterns of each user under different contextual situations and creates a new 2-dimensional recommendation space and does the final recommendation in that space. This paper also represents an evaluation process by implementing the proposed approach in a restaurant food recommendation system considering day, time, weather and companion as the contextual information and comparing the approach with the traditional 2dimensional one. The results of comparison illustrates that the multidimensional approach increases the recommendation quality. Keywords-component; context-awareness; multidimensional recommendation approach; mobile commerce; self-organizing maps; collaborative filtering