Mobile application usage prediction through context-based learning

The purchase and download of new applications on all types of smartphones and tablet computers has become increasingly popular. On each mobile device, many applications are installed, often resulting in crowded icon-based interfaces. In this paper, we present a framework for the prediction of a user's future mobile application usage behavior. On the mobile device, the framework continuously monitors the user's previous use of applications together with several context parameters such as speed and location. Based on the retrieved information, the framework automatically deduces application usage patterns. These patterns define a correlation between a used application and the monitored context information or between different applications. Furthermore, by combining several context parameters, context profiles are automatically generated. These profiles typically match with real life situations such as 'at home' or 'on the train' and are used to delimit the number of possible patterns, increasing both the positive prediction rate and the scalability of the system. A concept demonstrator for Android OS was developed and the implemented algorithms were evaluated in a detailed simulation setup. It is shown that the developed algorithms perform very well with a true positive rate of up to 90% for the considered evaluation scenarios

Revisitation analysis of smartphone app use

We present a revisitation analysis of smartphone use to investigate the question: do smartphones induce usage habits? We analysed three months of application launch logs from 165 users in naturalistic settings. Our analysis reveals distinct clusters of applications and users which share similar revisitation patterns. However, we show that much of smartphone usage on a macro-level is very similar to web browsing on desktops, and thus argue that smartphone usage is driven by innate service needs rather than technology characteristics. On the other hand, on a micro-level we identify unique characteristics in smartphone usage, and we present a rudimentary model that accounts for 92 % in the variability of our smartphone use. Author Keywords Revisitation, smartphone use, habits, user behaviou