Personalised viewing-time prediction in museums

People are often overwhelmed by the large amount of information provided in museum spaces, which makes it difficult for them to select exhibits of potential interest. As a first step in recommending exhibits where a visitor may wish to spend some time, this article investigates predictive user models for personalised prediction of museum visitors’ viewing times at exhibits. We consider two content-based models and a nearest-neighbour collaborative filter, and develop a collaborative model based on the theory of spatial processes which relies on a notion of distance between exhibits. We discuss models of exhibit distance derived from viewing-time similarity, semantic similarity and walking distance. The results from our evaluation with a real-world dataset of visitor pathways collected at Melbourne Museum (Melbourne, Australia) suggest that utilising walking and semantic distances between exhibits enables more accurate predictions of a visitor’s viewing times of unseen exhibits than using distances derived from observed exhibit viewing times. Our results also show that all models outperform a non-personalised baseline, that content-based viewing time prediction yields better results than nearest-neighbour collaborative prediction, and that our collaborative model based on spatial processes attains the highest predictive accuracy overall.