Profile-Free and Real-Time Task Recommendation in Mobile Crowdsensing

As a key research issue in mobile crowdsensing (MCS), recent studies on task recommendation have begun to focus on recommending tasks to participants according to the learned participant preferences. The common drawbacks of these studies are that, on the one hand, the factors affecting participant preferences are predefined, which is not practical as the influential factors are quite complex and a full map of participant profiles needs to be preexisted. On the other hand, they do not consider how to update the recommendation dynamically. To overcome these drawbacks, a profile-free and real-time task recommendation method is proposed in this work. First, we apply the recommendation systems to MCS to realize profile-free task recommendations. Second, a participant-task-location tensor is constructed, based on which an improved tensor factorization method is presented to provide task recommendations for participants at a given location. Finally, we design a real-time update algorithm based on the idea of one update at a time to update task recommendation lists for participants in real time. Based on real-world trace data sets, extensive evaluations show that the proposed method has obvious advantages over other baselines in terms of accuracy and time cost.