A time-based approach to effective recommender systems using implicit feedback

Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations on products or services to customers. Collaborative filtering is a widely used method of providing recommendations using explicit ratings on items from users. In some e-commerce environments, however, it is difficult to collect explicit feedback data; only implicit feedback is available.

In this paper, we present a method of building an effective collaborative filtering-based recommender system for an e-commerce environment without explicit feedback data. Our method constructs pseudo rating data from the implicit feedback data. When building the pseudo rating matrix, we incorporate temporal information such as the user’s purchase time and the item’s launch time in order to increase recommendation accuracy.

Based on this method, we built both user-based and item-based collaborative filtering-based recommender systems for character images (wallpaper) in a mobile e-commerce environment and conducted a variety of experiments. Empirical results show our time-incorporated recommender system is significantly more accurate than a pure collaborative filtering system.     

Recommendation agent impact on consumer online shopping: The Movie Magic case study

A simulated online shopping environment with a recommender system based on collaborative filtering data has been developed to empirically test the impact of recommendation agents in an online retail environment. The report provides some background for the most widely used types of recommender system based on collaborative filtering. The Movie Magic system developed for this study is described, as well as the experiment assessing the impact of such an agent on product promotion effectiveness, customer satisfaction with the website, and customer loyalty to the website. Finally, the report discusses the implications of the results for system developers and managers interested in using Intelligent Agent technology for enhancing e-commerce. By corroborating the proposed relationships between the use of the recommender agent and improved product promotion, customer satisfaction and loyalty, the results should aid online businesses in further understanding the benefits and limitations of using a recommender agent to support e-commerce.     

Applications of wavelet data reduction in a recommender system

Memory-based collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have emerged as an effective technique for information filtering. CF recommenders are being widely adopted for e-commerce applications to assist users in finding and selecting items of interest. As a result, the scalability of CF recommenders presents a significant challenge; one that is particularly resilient because the volume of data these systems utilize will continue to increase over time. This paper examines the impact of discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) as an approach to enhance the scalability of memory-based collaborative filtering recommender systems. In particular, a wavelet transformation methodology is proposed and applied to both synthetic and real-world recommender ratings. For experimental purposes, the DWT methodology’s effect on predictive accuracy and calculation speed is evaluated to compare recommendation quality and performance.     

A polynomial modeling based algorithm in top-N recommendation

Recommendation is the process of identifying and recommending items that are more likely to be of interest to a user. Recommender systems have been applied in variety of fields including e-commerce web pages to increase the sales through the page by making relevant recommendations to users. In this paper, we pose the problem of recommendation as an interpolation problem, which is not a trivial task due to the high dimensional structure of the data. Therefore, we deal with the issue of high dimension by representing the data with lower dimensions using High Dimensional Model Representation (HDMR) based algorithm. We combine this algorithm with the collaborative filtering philosophy to make recommendations using an analytical structure as the data model based on the purchase history matrix of the customers. The proposed approach is able to make a recommendation score for each item that have not been purchased by a customer which potentiates the power of the classical recommendations. Rather than using benchmark data sets for experimental assessments, we apply the proposed approach to a novel industrial data set obtained from an e-commerce web page from apparels domain to present its potential as a recommendation system. We test the accuracy of our recommender system with several pioneering methods in the literature. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach makes recommendations that are of interest to users and shows better accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.     

基于用户声誉的鲁棒协同推荐算法

随着推荐系统在电子商务界的快速发展以及取得的巨大经济收益, 有目的性的托攻击是目前协同过滤系统面临的重大安全威胁, 研究一种可抵御攻击的鲁棒推荐技术已成为目前推荐系统领域的重要课题.本文利用历史记录得到用户声誉, 建立声誉推荐系统, 并结合协同过滤推荐领域内的隐语义模型, 提出基于用户声誉的隐语义模型鲁棒协同算法.本文提出的算法从人为攻击和自然噪声两个方面对系统的鲁棒性进行了改善.在真实的数据集 Movielens 1M 上的实验表明, 与现有的鲁棒性推荐算法相比, 这种算法具有形式简单、可解释性强、稳定的特点, 且在精度得到一定提升的情况下大大增强了系统抵御攻击的能力.     

Privacy-preserving collaborative recommendations based on random perturbations

Collaborative recommender systems offer a solution to the information overload problem found in online environments such as e-commerce. The use of collaborative filtering, the most widely used recommendation method, gives rise to potential privacy issues. In addition, the user ratings utilized in collaborative filtering systems to recommend products or services must be protected. The purpose of this research is to provide a solution to the privacy concerns of collaborative filtering users, while maintaining high accuracy of recommendations. This paper proposes a multi-level privacy-preserving method for collaborative filtering systems by perturbing each rating before it is submitted to the server. The perturbation method is based on multiple levels and different ranges of random values for each level. Before the submission of each rating, the privacy level and the perturbation range are selected randomly from a fixed range of privacy levels. The proposed privacy method has been experimentally evaluated with the results showing that with a small decrease of utility, user privacy can be protected, while the proposed approach offers practical and effective results.     

协同过滤推荐系统综述

随着互联网和信息计算的飞速发展,衍生了海量数据,我们已经进入信息爆炸的时代。网络中各种信息量的指数型增长导致用户想要从大量信息中找到自己需要的信息变得越来越困难,信息过载问题日益突出。推荐系统在缓解信息过载问题中起着非常重要的作用,该方法通过研究用户的兴趣偏好进行个性化计算,由系统发现用户兴趣进而引导用户发现自己的信息需求。目前,推荐系统已经成为产业界和学术界关注、研究的热点问题,应用领域十分广泛。在电子商务、会话推荐、文章推荐、智慧医疗等多个领域都有所应用。传统的推荐算法主要包括基于内容的推荐、协同过滤推荐以及混合推荐。其中,协同过滤推荐是推荐系统中应用最广泛最成功的技术之一。该方法利用用户或物品间的相似度以及历史行为数据对目标用户进行推荐,因此存在用户冷启动和项目冷启动问题。此外,随着信息量的急剧增长,传统协同过滤推荐系统面对数据的快速增长会遇到严重的数据稀疏性问题以及可扩展性问题。为了缓解甚至解决这些问题,推荐系统研究人员进行了大量的工作。近年来,为了提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度,学者们开始关注推荐系统的多样性问题以及可解释性等问题。由于深度学习方法可以通过发现数据中用户和项目之间的非线性关系从而学习一个有效的特征表示,因此越来越受到推荐系统研究人员的关注。目前的工作主要是利用评分数据、社交网络信息以及其他领域信息等辅助信息,结合深度学习、数据挖掘等技术提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度。对此,本文首先对推荐系统以及传统推荐算法进行概述,然后重点介绍协同过滤推荐算法的相关工作。包括协同过滤推荐算法的任务、评价指标、常用数据集以及学者们在解决协同过滤算法存在的问题时所做的工作以及努力。最后提出未来的几个可研究方向。     

Mining changes in customer buying behavior for collaborative recommendations

The preferences of customers change over time. However, existing collaborative filtering (CF) systems are static, since they only incorporate information regarding whether a customer buys a product during a certain period and do not make use of the purchase sequences of customers. Therefore, the quality of the recommendations of the typical CF could be improved through the use of information on such sequences.In this study, we propose a new methodology for enhancing the quality of CF recommendation that uses customer purchase sequences. The proposed methodology is applied to a large department store in Korea and compared to existing CF techniques. Various experiments using real-world data demonstrate that the proposed methodology provides higher quality recommendations than do typical CF techniques, with better performance, especially with regard to heavy users.     

基于近邻关系的个性化推荐算法研究

协同过滤是目前电子商务推荐系统中广泛应用的最成功的推荐技术,但面临严峻的用户评分数据稀疏性和推荐实时性挑战。针对协同过滤中的数据稀疏问题,提出了一种基于最近邻的个性化推荐算法。通过维数简化技术对评分矩阵进行优化,降低数据稀疏性;采用一种新颖的相似性度量方法计算目标用户的最近邻居,产生推荐预测。实验结果表明,该算法有效地解决了数据稀疏,提高了推荐系统的推荐质量。     

Integrating AHP and data mining for product recommendation based on customer lifetime value

Product recommendation is a business activity that is critical in attracting customers. Accordingly, improving the quality of a recommendation to fulfill customers’ needs is important in fiercely competitive environments. Although various recommender systems have been proposed, few have addressed the lifetime value of a customer to a firm. Generally, customer lifetime value (CLV) is evaluated in terms of recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) variables. However, the relative importance among them varies with the characteristics of the product and industry. We developed a novel product recommendation methodology that combined group decision-making and data mining techniques. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was applied to determine the relative weights of RFM variables in evaluating customer lifetime value or loyalty. Clustering techniques were then employed to group customers according to the weighted RFM value. Finally, an association rule mining approach was implemented to provide product recommendations to each customer group. The experimental results demonstrated that the approach outperformed one with equally weighted RFM and a typical collaborative filtering (CF) method.     

基于用户特征的协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤算法是目前在电商系统中应用最广的推荐技术.为了缓解传统基于用户的协同过滤算法在冷启动、推荐准确性和数据稀疏性方面的缺点,本文提出基于用户特征的协同过滤推荐算法.此算法利用注册信息提取属性特征,并对已有的评分信息提取兴趣特征和信任度,综合以上各特征融合特征相似性进一步产生推荐.实验结果表明,与传统的基于用户的协同过滤算法做对比,基于用户特征的协同过滤算法对推荐的精度有大幅的提高.     

A new approach for combining content-based and collaborative filters

With the development of e-commerce and the proliferation of easily accessible information, recommender systems have become a popular technique to prune large information spaces so that users are directed toward those items that best meet their needs and preferences. A variety of techniques have been proposed for performing recommendations, including content-based and collaborative techniques. Content-based filtering selects information based on semantic content, whereas collaborative filtering combines the opinions of other users to make a prediction for a target user. In this paper, we describe a new filtering approach that combines the content-based filter and collaborative filter to capitalize on their respective strengths, and thereby achieves a good performance. We present a series of recommendations on the selection of the appropriate factors and also look into different techniques for calculating user-user similarities based on the integrated information extracted from user profiles and user ratings. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our approach and compare it with classic filters, the result of which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.     

Exploiting Pre-Trained Network Embeddings for Recommendations in Social Networks

Recommender systems as one of the most efficient information filtering techniques have been widely studied in recent years. However, traditional recommender systems only utilize user-item rating matrix for recommendations, and the social connections and item sequential patterns are ignored. But in our real life, we always turn to our friends for recommendations, and often select the items that have similar sequential patterns. In order to overcome these challenges, many studies have taken social connections and sequential information into account to enhance recommender systems. Although these existing studies have achieved good results, most of them regard social influence and sequential information as regularization terms, and the deep structure hidden in social networks and rating patterns has not been fully explored. On the other hand, neural network based embedding methods have shown their power in many recommendation tasks with their ability to extract high-level representations from raw data. Motivated by the above observations, we take the advantage of network embedding techniques and propose an embedding-based recommendation method, which is composed of the embedding model and the collaborative filtering model. Specifically, to exploit the deep structure hidden in social networks and rating patterns, a neural network based embedding model is first pre-trained, where the external user and item representations are extracted. Then, we incorporate these extracted factors into a collaborative filtering model by fusing them with latent factors linearly, where our method not only can leverage the external information to enhance recommendation, but also can exploit the advantage of collaborative filtering techniques. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and the importance of these external extracted factors.     

Amazon.com recommendations: item-to-item collaborative filtering

Recommendation algorithms are best known for their use on e-commerce Web sites, where they use input about a customer's interests to generate a list of recommended items. Many applications use only the items that customers purchase and explicitly rate to represent their interests, but they can also use other attributes, including items viewed, demographic data, subject interests, and favorite artists. At Amazon.com, we use recommendation algorithms to personalize the online store for each customer. The store radically changes based on customer interests, showing programming titles to a software engineer and baby toys to a new mother. There are three common approaches to solving the recommendation problem: traditional collaborative filtering, cluster models, and search-based methods. Here, we compare these methods with our algorithm, which we call item-to-item collaborative filtering. Unlike traditional collaborative filtering, our algorithm's online computation scales independently of the number of customers and number of items in the product catalog. Our algorithm produces recommendations in real-time, scales to massive data sets, and generates high quality recommendations.     

一种融合项目特征和移动用户信任关系的推荐算法

协同过滤推荐系统中普遍存在评分数据稀疏问题.传统的协同过滤推荐系统中的余弦、Pearson 等方法都是基于共同评分项目来计算用户间的相似度;而在稀疏的评分数据中,用户间共同评分的项目所占比重较小,不能准确地找到偏好相似的用户,从而影响协同过滤推荐的准确度.为了改变基于共同评分项目的用户相似度计算,使用推土机距离（earth mover's distance,简称EMD）实现跨项目的移动用户相似度计算,提出了一种融合项目特征和移动用户信任关系的协同过滤推荐算法.实验结果表明：与余弦、Pearson 方法相比,融合项目特征的用户相似度计算方法能够缓解评分数据稀疏对协同过滤算法的影响.所提出的推荐算法能够提高移动推荐的准确度.     

A collaborative filtering method for music recommendation using playing coefficients for artists and users

The great quantity of music content available online has increased interest in music recommender systems. However, some important problems must be addressed in order to give reliable recommendations. Many approaches have been proposed to deal with cold-start and first-rater drawbacks; however, the problem of generating recommendations for gray-sheep users has been less studied. Most of the methods that address this problem are content-based, hence they require item information that is not always available. Another significant drawback is the difficulty in obtaining explicit feedback from users, necessary for inducing recommendation models, which causes the well-known sparsity problem. In this work, a recommendation method based on playing coefficients is proposed for addressing the above-mentioned shortcomings of recommender systems when little information is available. The results prove that this proposal outperforms other collaborative filtering methods, including those that make use of user attributes.     

A GPU-oriented online recommendation algorithm for efficient processing of time-varying continuous data streams

Research on recommendation systems has gained a considerable amount of attention over the past decade as the number of online users and online contents continue to grow at an exponential rate. With the evolution of the social web, people generate and consume data in real time using online services such as Twitter, Facebook, and web news portals. With the rapidly growing online community, web-based retail systems and social media sites have to process several millions of user requests per day. Generating quality recommendations using this vast amount of data is itself a very challenging task. Nevertheless, opposed to the web-based retailers such as Amazon and Netflix, the above-mentioned social networking sites have to face an additional challenge when generating recommendations as their contents are very rapidly changing. Therefore, providing fresh information in the least amount of time is a major objective of such recommender systems. Although collaborative filtering is a widely used technique in recommendation systems, generating the recommendation model using this approach is a costly task, and often done offline. Hence, it is difficult to use collaborative filtering in the presence of dynamically changing contents, as such systems require frequent updates to the recommendation model to maintain the accuracy and the freshness of the recommendations. Parallel processing power of graphic processing units (GPUs) can be used to process large volumes of data with dynamically changing contents in real time, and accelerate the recommendation process for social media data streams. In this paper, we address the issue of rapidly changing contents, and propose a parallel on-the-fly collaborative filtering algorithm using GPUs to facilitate frequent updates to the recommendations model. We use a hybrid similarity calculation method by combining the item–item collaborative filtering with item category information and temporal information. The experimental results on real-world datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperformed several existing online CF algorithms in terms of accuracy, memory consumption, and runtime. It was also observed that the proposed algorithm scaled well with the data rate and the data volume, and generated recommendations in a timely manner.     

Leveraging clustering approaches to solve the gray-sheep users problem in recommender systems

Recommender systems apply data mining and machine learning techniques for filtering unseen information and can predict whether a user would like a given item. This paper focuses on gray-sheep users problem responsible for the increased error rate in collaborative filtering based recommender systems. This paper makes the following contributions: we show that (1) the presence of gray-sheep users can affect the performance – accuracy and coverage – of the collaborative filtering based algorithms, depending on the data sparsity and distribution; (2) gray-sheep users can be identified using clustering algorithms in offline fashion, where the similarity threshold to isolate these users from the rest of community can be found empirically. We propose various improved centroid selection approaches and distance measures for the K-means clustering algorithm; (3) content-based profile of gray-sheep users can be used for making accurate recommendations. We offer a hybrid recommendation algorithm to make reliable recommendations for gray-sheep users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a formal solution for gray-sheep users problem. By extensive experimental results on two different datasets (MovieLens and community of movie fans in the FilmTrust website), we showed that the proposed approach reduces the recommendation error rate for the gray-sheep users while maintaining reasonable computational performance.     

Enabling individualized recommendations and dynamic pricing of value-added services through willingness-to-pay data

When managing their growing service portfolio, many manufacturers in B2B markets face two significant problems: They fail to communicate the value of their service offerings and they lack the capability to generate profits with value-added services. To tackle these two issues, we have built and evaluated a collaborative filtering recommender system which (a) makes individualized recommendations of potentially interesting value-added services when customers express interest in a particular physical product and also (b) leverages estimations of a customer’s willingness to pay to allow for a dynamic pricing of those services and the incorporation of profitability considerations into the recommendation process. The recommender system is based on an adapted conjoint analysis method combined with a stepwise componential segmentation algorithm to collect individualized preference and willingness-to-pay data. Compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, our system requires significantly less customer input before making a recommendation, does not suffer from the usual sparseness of data and cold-start problems of collaborative filtering systems, and, as is shown in an empirical evaluation with a sample of 428 customers in the machine tool market, does not diminish the predictive accuracy of the recommendations offered.