Context Dependent Preference Acquisition with Personality-Based Active Learning in Mobile Recommender Systems

Nowadays, Recommender Systems (RSs) play a key role in many businesses. They provide consumers with relevant recommendations, e.g., Places of Interest (POIs) to a tourist, based on user preference data, mainly in the form of ratings for items. The accuracy of recommendations largely depends on the quality and quantity of the ratings (preferences) provided by the users. However, users often tend to rate no or only few items, causing low accuracy of the recommendation. Active Learning (AL) addresses this problem by actively selecting items to be presented to the user in order to acquire a larger number of high-quality ratings (preferences), and hence, improve the recommendation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a personalized active learning approach that leverages user’s personality data to get more and better in-context ratings. We have designed a novel human computer interaction and assessed our proposed approach in a live user study - which is not common in active learning research. The main result is that the system is able to collect better ratings and provide more relevant recommendations compared to a variant that is using a state of the art approach to preference acquisition.