A Television Recommender System Learning a User’s Time-Aware Watching Patterns Using Quadratic Programming

Abstract

In this paper, a novel television (TV) program recommendation method is proposed by merging multiple preferences. We use channels and genres of programs, which is available information in standalone TVs, as features for the recommendation. The proposed method performs multi-time contextual profiling and constructs multiple-time contextual preference matrices of channels and genres. Since multiple preference models are constructed with different time contexts, there can be conflicts among them. In order to effectively merge the preferences with the minimum number of conflicts, we develop a quadratic programming model. The optimization problem is formulated with a minimum number of constraints so that the optimization process is scalable and fast even in a standalone TV with low computational power. Experiments with a real-world dataset prove that the proposed method is more efficient and accurate than other TV recommendation methods. Our method improves recommendation performance by 5–50% compared to the baselines.

Keywords

• context awareness
• recommender systems
• time-aware recommendation
• time context
• TV program recommendation
• quadratic programming