Goal-Oriented Next Best Activity Recommendation using Reinforcement Learning

Recommending a sequence of activities for an ongoing case requires that the recommendations conform to the underlying business process and meet the performance goal of either completion time or process outcome. Existing work on next activity prediction can predict the future activity but cannot provide guarantees of the prediction being conformant or meeting the goal. Hence, we propose a goal-oriented next best activity recommendation. Our proposed framework uses a deep learning model to predict the next best activity and an estimated value of a goal given the activity. A reinforcement learning method explores the sequence of activities based on the estimates likely to meet one or more goals. We further address a real-world problem of multiple goals by introducing an additional reward function to balance the outcome of a recommended activity and satisfy the goal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on four real-world datasets with different characteristics. The results show that the recommendations from our proposed approach outperform in goal satisfaction and conformance compared to the existing state-of-the-art next best activity recommendation techniques.

Indian Regional Movie Dataset for Recommender Systems

Indian regional movie dataset is the first database of regional Indian movies, users and their ratings. It consists of movies belonging to 18 different Indian regional languages and metadata of users with varying demographics. Through this dataset, the diversity of Indian regional cinema and its huge viewership is captured. We analyze the dataset that contains roughly 10K ratings of 919 users and 2,851 movies using some supervised and unsupervised collaborative filtering techniques like Probabilistic Matrix Factorization, Matrix Completion, Blind Compressed Sensing etc. The dataset consists of metadata information of users like age, occupation, home state and known languages. It also consists of metadata of movies like genre, language, release year and cast. India has a wide base of viewers which is evident by the large number of movies released every year and the huge box-office revenue. This dataset can be used for designing recommendation systems for Indian users and regional movies, which do not, yet, exist. The dataset can be downloaded from \href{https://goo.gl/EmTPv6}{https://goo.gl/EmTPv6}.