The traditional recommendation system usually ignored the contextual information. However, there are usually various factors influencing user's decision. Therefore, the incorporation of contextual information in the recommendation process has attracted major interest. In this paper, firstly, the classical collaborative filtering, content-based, network-based architecture and hybrid recommender system research since 2008 are described. Secondly, the research in context-aware recommender system

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... e mainly described, then its characteristics and limitations are analyzed. Finally, the problems and challenges of context-aware recommender system are summarized, and some improved methods and possible future research directions are put forward.