Mobi-SAGE-RS: A sparse additive generative model-based mobile application recommender system

With the rapid prevalence of smart mobile devices and the dramatic proliferation of mobile applications (Apps), App recommendation becomes an emergent task that will benefit different stockholders of mobile App ecosystems. However, the extreme sparsity of user-App matrix and many newly emerging Apps create severe challenges, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their recommendation performance. Besides, unlike traditional items, Apps have rights to access users’ personal resources (e.g., location, message and contact) which may lead to security risk or privacy leak. Thus, users’ choosing of Apps are influenced by not only their personal interests but also their privacy preferences. Moreover, user privacy preferences vary with App categories. In light of the above challenges, we propose a mobile sparse additive generative model (Mobi-SAGE) to recommend Apps by considering both user interests and category-aware user privacy preferences in this paper. To overcome the challenges from data sparsity and cold start, Mobi-SAGE exploits both textual and visual content associated with Apps to learn multi-view topics for user interest modeling. We collected a large-scale and real-world dataset from 360 App store - the biggest Android App platform in China, and conducted extensive experiments on it. The experimental results demonstrate that our Mobi-SAGE consistently and significantly outperforms the other existing state-of-the-art methods, which implies the importance of exploiting category-aware user privacy preferences and the multi-modal App content data on personalized App recommendation.