Investigating the impact of demographic and device information in the recommendation of mobile applications

Abstract

The number of people with access to mobile devices, as well as applications to these devices (i.e., apps), has been increasing significantly. Thus, users have to choose among a large number of apps proposing to do the same functions, those that better serve them. A possible solution to this problem is the adoption of recommendation systems. Meanwhile, usually these systems consider only users' preferences to create a profile or request sensitive data (e.g., call and message logs). This work investigates the impact of using demographic and device information on app recommendation by using only easy-to-obtain data to enrich a user profile. We evaluate two approaches: a similarity-based Collaborative Filtering with a limited number of apps and a topic-based approach (i.e., LDA) with wider large-scale data. We also inspected the results under both apps and categories context. The general results reveal that the enriched data provides a better app recommendation with the addition of information about the user's region mean wage achieving up to 210% (or 12 percentage points) of improvement in terms of recall.