Experimental comparison of pre- vs. post-filtering approaches in context-aware recommender systems

Abstract

Recently, methods for generating context-aware recommendations were classified into the pre-filtering, post-filtering and contextual modeling approaches. Although some of these methods have been studied independently, no prior research compared the performance of these methods to determine which of them is better than the others. This paper focuses on comparing the pre-filtering and the post-filtering approaches and identifying which method dominates the other and under which circumstances. Since there are no clear winners in this comparison, we propose an alternative more effective method of selecting the winners in the pre- vs. the post-filtering comparison. This strategy provides analysts and companies with a practical suggestion on how to pick a good pre- or post-filtering approach in an effective manner to improve performance of a context-aware recommender system.