RECATHON: A Middleware for Context-Aware Recommendation in Database Systems

This paper presents RECATHON, a context-aware recommender system built entirely inside a database system. Unlike traditional recommender systems that are context-free where they support the general query of Recommend movies for a certain user, RECATHON users can request recommendations based on their age, location, gender, or any other contextual/ demographical/preferential user attribute. A main challenge of supporting such kind of recommenders is the difficulty of deciding what attributes to build recommenders on. RECATHON addresses this challenge as it supports building recommenders in database systems in an analogous way to building index structures. Users can decide to create recommenders on selected attributes, e.g., Age and/or gender, and then entertain efficient support of multidimensional recommenders on the selected attributes. RECATHON employs a multi-dimensional index structure for each built recommender that can be accessed using novel query execution algorithms to support efficient retrieval for recommender queries. Experimental results based on an actual prototype of RECATHON, built inside Postgre SQL, using real Movie Lens and Foursquare data show that RECATHON exhibits real time performance for large-scale multidimensional recommendation.