An approach is provided for determining one or more recommendations based on an incremental update of a recommendation model. An incremental platform causes, at least in part, a categorization of activity information into a plurality of subsets based, at least in part, on one or more user groups, one or more item groups, at least one update time for at least one recommendation model associated with the activity information, or a combination thereof. The incremental platform further processes and/or facilitates a processing of the activity information based, at least in part, on the categorization to determine whether to perform an incremental update of the at least one recommendation model. The incremental platform also determines one or more recommendations based, at least in part, on the at least one recommendation model, the incremental update, or a combination thereof.