Contextualized Recommendation of Aviation Ancillary Services Based on Passenger Portraits

Ancillary services are crucial to Chinese domestic airlines’ profits. Personalized recommendations for ancillary aviation services must consider massive amounts of contextualized online and offline data. The issue of sparsity is more serious in massive data, which makes traditional collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms less accurate. This article adds instant contextualized travel-related factors to the modeling of air passengers’ ancillary services, thus achieving dynamic recommendations. It also proposes a four-tuple to construct a contextual ontology as a conceptual model of ancillary aviation services. The article establishes a context-aware air passenger portrait model based on four tag sets, including passenger attribute tags, ancillary service attribute tags, passenger interaction behavior tags, and contextual attribute tags. Further, it proposes a multidimensional method for calculating contextual portrait similarity; the method recommends a list of the top-N items to the target passenger according to the similarity calculation. Compared with the traditional CF recommendation method, the proposed algorithm has better performance, improving the accuracy rate by 4.3% and the recall rate by 2.62%. The final experimental result demonstrates that the contextual recommendation method achieves higher passenger satisfaction, which can provide consolidated data and decision support for the management of aviation ancillary services.