Real-Time Learning from an Expert in Deep Recommendation Systems with Application to mHealth for Physical Exercises

Recommendation systems play an important role in today’s digital world. They have found applications in various areas such as music platforms, e.g., Spotify, and movie streaming services, e.g., Netflix. Less research effort has been devoted to physical exercise recommendation systems. Sedentary lifestyles have become the major driver of several diseases as well as healthcare costs. In this paper, we develop a recommendation system to recommend daily exercise activities to users based on their history, profiles and similar users. The developed recommendation system uses a deep recurrent neural network with user-profile attention and temporal attention mechanisms. Moreover, exercise recommendation systems are significantly different from streaming recommendation systems in that we are not able to collect click feedback from the participants in exercise recommendation systems. Thus, we propose a real-time, expert-in-the-loop active learning procedure. The active learner calculates the uncertainty of the recommendation system at each time step for each user and asks an expert for recommendation when the certainty is low. In this paper, we derive the probability distribution function of marginal distance, and use it to determine when to ask experts for feedback. Our experimental results on a mHealth and MovieLens datasets show improved accuracy after incorporating the real-time active learner with the recommendation system.