Context-Aware and Sequential Pattern Mining based recommendations for Research Papers: A Hybrid Approach

Abstract

The availability of huge volumes of online research papers over scholarly communities has been increasing rapidly with the evolution of the Internet. Meanwhile, several researchers confront troubles while retrieving suitable and relevant research papers according to their research necessities due to information overload. Besides, the research necessities vary from researcher to researcher according to their contextual state and the online behavior in sequential access. Conventional recommendation approaches for instance content-based filtering (CBF) and collaborative filtering (CF) utilize content features and rankings correspondingly, in order to produce recommendations for the researchers. In spite of this, it is inevitable to incorporate scholar’s contextual information and sequential access behavior into the recommendation procedure to generate accurate and personalized recommendations for research papers. Conventional recommender systems do not incorporate such information in the recommended procedure to compute similarities of scholars and provide recommendations; thus, they are more liable to produce an irrelevant list of recommendations in a scholarly environment. Moreover, conventional recommendation approaches generate inaccurate recommendations in presence of a high level of sparsity in the rankings. In this article, we introduce a novel method for research paper recommendations that incorporates the benefits of collective filtering (CF), context-awareness, and sequential pattern mining (SPM) to propose research papers to scholars in a hybrid manner. Context-awareness in our methodology involves the scholar's contextual state, such as skill level and research goals; SPM is used to mine weblogs and reveal sequential access actions of scholars, and CF is used to measure predictions based on correlations between scholars and generate context-aware and sequential trend mining based recommendations for the targeted scholars. Experimental evaluations of our approach indicate the excellence of our approach over other baseline approaches in terms of precision, recall, F1, and mean absolute error (MAE).