Mobile App Classification with Enriched Contextual Information

The study of the use of mobile Apps plays an important role in understanding the user preferences, and thus provides the opportunities for intelligent personalized context-based services. 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. For instance, there is limited contextual information about mobile Apps in their names. However, this contextual information is usually incomplete and ambiguous. To this end, in this paper, we propose an approach for first enriching 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 the Maximum Entropy model for training a mobile App classifier. To validate the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on 443 mobile users' device logs to show both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. The experimental results clearly show that our approach outperforms two state-of-the-art benchmark methods with a significant margin.