Exploiting enriched contextual information for mobile app classification

Abstract

A key step for the mobile app usage analysis is to classify apps into some predefined categories. However, it is a nontrivial task to effectively classify mobile apps due to the limited contextual information available for the analysis. To this end, in this paper, we propose an approach to first enrich the contextual information of mobile apps by exploiting the additional Web knowledge from the Web search engine. Then, inspired by the observation that different types of mobile apps may be relevant to different real-world contexts, we also extract some contextual features for mobile apps from the context-rich device logs of mobile users. Finally, we combine all the enriched contextual information into a Maximum Entropy model for training a mobile app classifier. The experimental results based on 443 mobile users' device logs clearly show that our approach outperforms two state-of-the-art benchmark methods with a significant margin.