A patience-aware recommendation scheme for shared accounts on mobile devices

As sharing of accounts is quite common, the design of efficient recommender schemes for shared accounts has raised much attention recently. Generally speaking, after each login, recommender systems should identify the current user behind and leverage this information to make recommendations. One naive approach is first to identify the identity of the current user and then make recommendations. However, this two-stage based approach may not achieve satisfactory performance. The key is that the recommended items favoring identifying users in the first stage may not be interesting to the users, which can deplete the user's patience quickly and cause early termination of users. To address the problem, we propose a novel recommendation scheme that makes a tradeoff between recommending discriminating items (helpful for identifying the user) and recommending interesting ones to the user (helpful for increasing the number of clicks). Under this scheme, we develop a patience model to capture the user's patience during the recommendation process. Moreover, we incorporate mobile sensor data into our approach to improve the performance of the system. We implemented the above system in an App on mobile devices and carried out extensive experiments. The results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches.