Multi-objective mobile app recommendation: A system-level collaboration approach

The tremendous increase of mobile apps has given rise to the significant challenge of app discovery. To alleviate such a challenge, recommender systems are employed. However, the development of recommender systems for mobile apps is at a slow pace. One main reason is that a general framework for efficient development is still missing. Meanwhile, most existing systems mainly focus on single objective recommendations, which only reflect monotonous app needs of users. For such reasons, we initially present a general framework for developing mobile app recommender systems, which leverages the multi-objective approach and the system-level collaboration strategy. Our framework thus can satisfy ranges of app needs of users by integrating the strengths of various recommender systems. To implement the framework, we originally introduce the method of swarm intelligence to the recommendation of mobile apps. To be detailed, we firstly present a new set based optimization problem which is originated from the collaborative app recommendation. We then propose a novel set based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, namely, the Cylinder Filling Set based PSO, to address such a problem. Furthermore, we implement the algorithm based on three popular mobile app recommender systems and conduct evaluations. Results verify that our framework and algorithm are with promising performance from both the effectiveness and efficiency.