A user similarity-based Top-N recommendation approach for mobile in-application advertising

Ensuring scalability of recommender systems without sacrificing the quality of the recommendations produced, presents significant challenges, especially in the large-scale, real-world setting of mobile ad targeting. In this paper, we propose MobRec, a novel two-stage user similarity based approach to recommendation which combines information provided by slowly-changing features of the mobile context and implicit user feedback indicative of user preferences. MobRec uses the contextual features to cluster, during an off-line stage, users that share similar patterns of mobile behavior. In the online stage, MobRec focuses on the cluster consisting of users that are most similar to the target user in terms of their contextual features as well as implicit feedback. MobRec also employs a novel strategy for robust estimation of user preferences from noisy clicks. Results of experiments using a large-scale real-world mobile advertising dataset demonstrate that MobRec outperforms the state-of-the-art neighborhood-based as well as latent factor-based recommender systems, in terms of both scalability and the quality of the recommendations. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.