A target advertisement system based on TV viewer’s profile reasoning

The traditional broadcasting services such as terrestrial, satellite and cable broadcasting have been unidirectional mass media regardless of TV viewer’s preferences. Recently rich media streaming has become possible via the broadband networks. Furthermore, since bidirectional communication is possible, personalcasting such as personalized streaming service has been emerging by taking into account the user’s preference on content genres, viewing times and actors/actresses etc. Accordingly personal media becomes an important means for content provision service in addition to the traditional broadcasting service as mass media. In this paper, we introduce a user profile reasoning method for TV viewers. The user profile reasoning is made in terms of genre preference and TV viewing times for TV viewer’s groups in different genders and ages. For user profiling reasoning, the TV viewing history data is used to train the proposed user profiling reasoning algorithm which allows for target advertisement for different age/gender groups. To show the effectiveness of our proposed user profile reasoning method, we present plenty of the experimental results by using real TV usage history.     

Modeling and broadening temporal user interest in personalized news recommendation

User profiling is an important step for solving the problem of personalized news recommendation. Traditional user profiling techniques often construct profiles of users based on static historical data accessed by users. However, due to the frequent updating of news repository, it is possible that a user’s fine-grained reading preference would evolve over time while his/her long-term interest remains stable. Therefore, it is imperative to reason on such preference evaluation for user profiling in news recommenders. Besides, in content-based news recommenders, a user’s preference tends to be stable due to the mechanism of selecting similar content-wise news articles with respect to the user’s profile. To activate users’ reading motivations, a successful recommender needs to introduce “somewhat novel” articles to users.In this paper, we initially provide an experimental study on the evolution of user interests in real-world news recommender systems, and then propose a novel recommendation approach, in which the long-term and short-term reading preferences of users are seamlessly integrated when recommending news items. Given a hierarchy of newly-published news articles, news groups that a user might prefer are differentiated using the long-term profile, and then in each selected news group, a list of news items are chosen as the recommended candidates based on the short-term user profile. We further propose to select news items from the user–item affinity graph using absorbing random walk model to increase the diversity of the recommended news list. Extensive empirical experiments on a collection of news data obtained from various popular news websites demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.     

社会化推荐系统的研究进展综述

对社会网络环境下构建个性化推荐系统的现有技术进行综述。介绍社会网络的基本概念,简述推荐系统的应用领域和目前面临的挑战,重点介绍社会化推荐的相关技术的研究现状,包括用户生成内容、社会化标签推荐、博客挖掘和基于信任的推荐,分析社会化推荐面临的主要问题。利用Web 2．0环境下的用户生成内容,为解决用户配置和冷启动问题提供一个研究方向。     

A flexible semantic inference methodology to reason about user preferences in knowledge-based recommender systems

Recommender systems arose with the goal of helping users search in overloaded information domains (like e-commerce, e-learning or Digital TV). These tools automatically select items (commercial products, educational courses, TV programs, etc.) that may be appealing to each user taking into account his/her personal preferences. The personalization strategies used to compare these preferences with the available items suffer from well-known deficiencies that reduce the quality of the recommendations. Most of the limitations arise from using syntactic matching techniques because they miss a lot of useful knowledge during the recommendation process. In this paper, we propose a personalization strategy that overcomes these drawbacks by applying inference techniques borrowed from the Semantic Web. Our approach reasons about the semantics of items and user preferences to discover complex associations between them. These semantic associations provide additional knowledge about the user preferences, and permit the recommender system to compare them with the available items in a more effective way. The proposed strategy is flexible enough to be applied in many recommender systems, regardless of their application domain. Here, we illustrate its use in AVATAR, a tool that selects appealing audiovisual programs from among the myriad available in Digital TV.     

基于用户相似性传递的跨平台交叉推荐算法

个性化推荐系统在电子商务领域中的广泛应用带来了巨大的经济效益和良好的用户体验。由于用户数据往往分布在多个不同的网站,单个网站的推荐系统受制于数据稀疏性的限制,难以获得准确的推荐效果。该文提出了一种基于传递相似性的交叉推荐系统算法,可以利用多个网站平台数据计算不同网站中的用户的相似度,从而很大程度上克服了推荐系统中的数据稀疏性以及冷启动问题。结果显示,该交叉推荐算法与传统的针对单个数据集的推荐算法相比,推荐的精确性有一至两倍的提高。     

User preference mining techniques for personalized applications

Advanced personalized e-applications require comprehensive knowledge about their users’ likes and dislikes in order to provide individual product recommendations, personal customer advice, and custom-tailored product offers. In our approach we model such preferences as strict partial orders with “A is better than B” semantics, which has been proven to be very suitable in various e-applications. In this paper we present preference mining techniques for detecting strict partial order preferences in user log data. Real-life e-applications like online shops or financial services usually have large log data sets containing the transactions of their customers. Since the preference miner uses sophisticated SQL operations to execute all data intensive operations on database layer, our algorithms scale well even for such large log data sets. With preference mining personalized e-applications can gain valuable knowledge about their customers’ preferences, which can be applied for personalized product recommendations, individual customer service, or one-to-one marketing.     

Personalization in an interactive learning environment through a virtual character

Traditional hypermedia applications present the same content and provide identical navigational support to all users. Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) make it possible to construct personalized presentations to each user, according to preferences and needs identified. We present in this paper an alternative approach to educational AHS where a virtual character personalizes the interaction with the user through the use of a particular recommender system. The character has natural language communication abilities; it can learn students’ profiles and use this knowledge to recommend appropriate contents and activities. Through its interaction with the user, the character is able to collect and organize information about students in order to identify appropriate suggestions of contents. The recommender system employs a knowledge representation scheme that is easy to understand and to modify, enabling teachers/tutors to explore the types of recommendations being made and to appreciate why they are made. An experiment with computer science students was carried out in order to validate the approach proposed. The results of the experiment showed that the presentation of personalized links through a virtual character had a positive impact in the users’ perception of the system as a learning tool. The combination of the virtual character with a recommender system proved to be a good alternative for the delivery of personalized contents without making constant changes in the main user interface. This approach provides mechanisms to guide users through paths of study followed by students with similar profiles, without violating the human–computer interaction principle of perceived stability.     

The state-of-the-art in personalized recommender systems for social networking

With the explosion of Web 2.0 application such as blogs, social and professional networks, and various other types of social media, the rich online information and various new sources of knowledge flood users and hence pose a great challenge in terms of information overload. It is critical to use intelligent agent software systems to assist users in finding the right information from an abundance of Web data. Recommender systems can help users deal with information overload problem efficiently by suggesting items (e.g., information and products) that match users’ personal interests. The recommender technology has been successfully employed in many applications such as recommending films, music, books, etc. The purpose of this report is to give an overview of existing technologies for building personalized recommender systems in social networking environment, to propose a research direction for addressing user profiling and cold start problems by exploiting user-generated content newly available in Web 2.0.     

Exploring synergies between content-based filtering and Spreading Activation techniques in knowledge-based recommender systems

Recommender systems fight information overload by selecting automatically items that match the personal preferences of each user. The so-called content-based recommenders suggest items similar to those the user liked in the past, using syntactic matching mechanisms. The rigid nature of such mechanisms leads to recommending only items that bear strong resemblance to those the user already knows. Traditional collaborative approaches face up to overspecialization by considering the preferences of other users, which causes other severe limitations. In this paper, we avoid the intrinsic pitfalls of collaborative solutions and diversify the recommendations by reasoning about the semantics of the user’s preferences. Specifically, we present a novel content-based recommendation strategy that resorts to semantic reasoning mechanisms adopted in the Semantic Web, such as Spreading Activation techniques and semantic associations. We have adopted these mechanisms to fulfill the personalization requirements of recommender systems, enabling to discover extra knowledge about the user’s preferences and leading to more accurate and diverse suggestions. Our approach is generic enough to be used in a wide variety of domains and recommender systems. The proposal has been preliminary evaluated by statistics-driven tests involving real users in the recommendation of Digital TV contents. The results reveal the users’ satisfaction regarding the accuracy and diversity of the reasoning-driven content-based recommendations.     

Mining Skewed and Sparse Transaction Data for Personalized Shopping Recommendation

A good shopping recommender system can boost sales in a retailer store. To provide accurate recommendation, the recommender needs to accurately predict a customer's preference, an ability difficult to acquire. Conventional data mining techniques, such as association rule mining and collaborative filtering, can generally be applied to this problem, but rarely produce satisfying results due to the skewness and sparsity of transaction data. In this paper, we report the lessons that we learned in two real-world data mining applications for personalized shopping recommendation. We learned that extending a collaborative filtering method based on ratings (e.g., GroupLens) to perform personalized shopping recommendation is not trivial and that it is not appropriate to apply association-rule based methods (e.g., the IBM SmartPad system) for large scale prediction of customers' shopping preferences. Instead, a probabilistic graphical model can be more effective in handling skewed and sparse data. By casting collaborative filtering algorithms in a probabilistic framework, we derived HyPAM (Hybrid Poisson Aspect Modelling), a novel probabilistic graphical model for personalized shopping recommendation. Experimental results show that HyPAM outperforms GroupLens and the IBM method by generating much more accurate predictions of what items a customer will actually purchase in the unseen test data. The data sets and the results are made available for download at http://chunnan.iis.sinica.edu.tw/hypam/HyPAM.html.     

A content-collaborative recommender that exploits WordNet-based user profiles for neighborhood formation

Collaborative and content-based filtering are the recommendation techniques most widely adopted to date. Traditional collaborative approaches compute a similarity value between the current user and each other user by taking into account their rating style, that is the set of ratings given on the same items. Based on the ratings of the most similar users, commonly referred to as neighbors, collaborative algorithms compute recommendations for the current user. The problem with this approach is that the similarity value is only computable if users have common rated items. The main contribution of this work is a possible solution to overcome this limitation. We propose a new content-collaborative hybrid recommender which computes similarities between users relying on their content-based profiles, in which user preferences are stored, instead of comparing their rating styles. In more detail, user profiles are clustered to discover current user neighbors. Content-based user profiles play a key role in the proposed hybrid recommender. Traditional keyword-based approaches to user profiling are unable to capture the semantics of user interests. A distinctive feature of our work is the integration of linguistic knowledge in the process of learning semantic user profiles representing user interests in a more effective way, compared to classical keyword-based profiles, due to a sense-based indexing. Semantic profiles are obtained by integrating machine learning algorithms for text categorization, namely a naïve Bayes approach and a relevance feedback method, with a word sense disambiguation strategy based exclusively on the lexical knowledge stored in the WordNet lexical database. Experiments carried out on a content-based extension of the EachMovie dataset show an improvement of the accuracy of sense-based profiles with respect to keyword-based ones, when coping with the task of classifying movies as interesting (or not) for the current user. An experimental session has been also performed in order to evaluate the proposed hybrid recommender system. The results highlight the improvement in the predictive accuracy of collaborative recommendations obtained by selecting like-minded users according to user profiles.     

一种基于Sigmoid函数的改进协同过滤推荐算法

随着电子商务和社交网络的蓬勃发展, 推荐系统逐渐成为数据挖掘领域的重要研究方向。推荐系统能够从海量信息中定位用户兴趣点, 提供个性化服务。协同过滤算法能够有效分析用户偏好, 提供合适的推荐服务。针对评分矩阵稀疏时传统协同过滤算法性能很差的问题, 提出一种基于Sigmoid函数的改进推荐系统算法。利用Sigmoid函数对不同项目进行建模, 得到项目的平均受欢迎程度; 利用Sigmoid函数对不同用户进行建模, 将评分映射为用户对项目的喜好程度; 根据用户对项目喜好程度应该与项目平均受欢迎程度贴近的原则进行评分预测。在两组真实数据集合上的实验结果表明, 该算法较好地解决了数据稀疏性问题, 能够有效提高传统算法的预测准确性。     

一种基于用户播放行为序列的个性化视频推荐策略

本文针对在线视频服务网站的个性化推荐问题,提出了一种基于用户播放行为序列的个性化推荐策略.该策略通过深度神经网络词向量模型分析用户播放视频行为数据,将视频映射成等维度的特征向量,提取视频的语义特征.聚类用户播放历史视频的特征向量,建模用户兴趣分布矩阵.结合用户兴趣偏好和用户观看历史序列生成推荐列表.在大规模的视频服务系统中进行了离线实验,相比随机算法、基于物品的协同过滤和基于用户的协同过滤传统推荐策略,本方法在用户观看视频的Top-N推荐精确率方面平均分别获得22.3%、30.7%和934%的相对提升,在召回率指标上分别获得52.8%、41%和1065%的相对提升.进一步地与矩阵分解算法SVD++、基于双向LSTM模型和注意力机制的Bi-LSTM+Attention算法和基于用户行为序列的深度兴趣网络DIN比较,Top-N推荐精确率和召回率也得到了明显提升.该推荐策略不仅获得了较高的精确率和召回率,还尝试解决传统推荐面临大规模工业数据集时的数据要求严苛、数据稀疏和数据噪声等问题.     

Personalised online sales using web usage data mining

Practically every major company with a retail operation has its own web site and online sales facilities. This paper describes a toolset that exploits web usage data mining techniques to identify customer Internet browsing patterns. These patterns are then used to underpin a personalised product recommendation system for online sales. Within the architecture, a Kohonen neural network or self-organizing map (SOM) has been trained for use both offline, to discover user group profiles, and in real-time to examine active user click stream data, make a match to a specific user group, and recommend a unique set of product browsing options appropriate to an individual user. Our work demonstrates that this approach can overcome the scalability problem that is common among these types of system. Our results also show that a personalised recommender system powered by the SOM predictive model is able to produce consistent recommendations.     

Dealing with incomplete information in a fuzzy linguistic recommender system to disseminate information in university digital libraries

As in the Web, the growing of information is the main problem of the academic digital libraries. Thus, similar tools could be applied in university digital libraries to facilitate the information access by the students and teachers. In [46] we presented a fuzzy linguistic recommender system to advice research resources in university digital libraries. The problem of this system is that the user profiles are provided directly by the own users and the process for acquiring user preferences is quite difficult because it requires too much user effort. In this paper we present a new fuzzy linguistic recommender system that facilitates the acquisition of the user preferences to characterize the user profiles. We allow users to provide their preferences by means of incomplete fuzzy linguistic preference relation. We include tools to manage incomplete information when the users express their preferences, and, in such a way, we show that the acquisition of the user profiles is improved.     

Human factors in the design of a personalizable EPG: preference-indication strategies, habit watching and trust

The article describes a user study to support the design of a personalizable EPG (Electronic TV Programme Guide), and of its user interface for editing user preference profiles regarding TV channels and categories. This study focuses on issues related to users' behaviour and perceptions regarding a personalizable EPG, and especially regarding the personalization process. Users were presented with a paper-and-pencil procedure to indicate their TV viewing preferences, as well as with an electronic version. Their strategies were observed and their opinions asked, especially on trusting a system that uses this data. Moreover, their viewing behaviour was monitored over a period of two weeks, and recommendations for the second week were based on the viewing behaviour of the first week. The results indicate that users are reasonably comfortable and consistent in describing their viewing habits in terms of preferences, both for the paper-and-pencil and electronic preference-indication procedures, but that fine tuning this profile on the basis of habit watching would considerably improve the efficacy of the recommendations. It was found that subjects trust the system with the task of preselecting their TV programmes on the basis of their preference indications, although they are not sure whether a habit-watching system would be capable of following their changing habits over time.     

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.     

基于信任机制下概率矩阵分解的用户评分预测

互联网的蓬勃发展,在为用户提供便利的同时,其海量信息也为用户选择造成了困难,基于用户理解的信息推荐服务正成为应时之需.相较于面向单个用户信息的传统推荐技术,基于社交信息的推荐技术通过引入影响力建模,可以更真实地还原用户属性及行为.然而,已有的社交推荐技术往往停留于对用户影响的笼统归纳,并没有对其内在机制进行清晰分类和量化.针对这一问题,通过对用户评分行为中的信任关系进行分析,着重研究了信任用户间接影响用户偏好和直接影响用户评分两种不同机制,进而提出了基于用户间信任关系融合建模的概率矩阵分解模型TPMF,从而实现对上述两种机制的有效融合.在此基础之上,针对不同用户受两种机制影响权重不同的问题,通过借助评分相关性对用户进行聚类并映射到相应权重,实现了用户模型参数的个性化选择.公开数据集的多项实验结果表明：提出的TPMF及其衍生算法在各项指标上优于现有代表性算法,验证了所提出的影响机制及技术框架的有效性.     

Online recommender system for radio station hosting based on information fusion and adaptive tag-aware profiling

We present a new recommender system developed for the Russian interactive radio network FMhost. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first model and associated case study for recommending radio stations hosted by real DJs rather than automatically built streamed playlists. To address such problems as cold start, gray sheep, boosting of rankings, preference and repertoire dynamics, and absence of explicit feedback, the underlying model combines a collaborative user-based approach with personalized information from tags of listened tracks in order to match user and radio station profiles. This is made possible with adaptive tag-aware profiling that follows an online learning strategy based on user history. We compare the proposed algorithms with singular value decomposition (SVD) in terms of precision, recall, and normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG) measures; experiments show that in our case the fusion-based approach demonstrates the best results. In addition, we give a theoretical analysis of some useful properties of fusion-based linear combination methods in terms of graded ordered sets.     

Mining affective needs of automotive industry customers for building a mass-customization recommender system

Mass customization systems aim to receive customer preferences in order to facilitate personalization of products and services. Current online configuration systems are unable to efficiently identify real customer affective needs because they offer an excess variety of products that usually confuse customers. On the other hand, mining affective customer needs may result in recommender systems, which can enhance existing configuration systems by recommending initial configurations according to customer affective needs. This paper introduces a mass customization recommender system that exploits data mining techniques on automotive industry customer data aiming at revealing associations between user affective needs and the design parameters of automotive products. One key novelty of the presented approach is that it deploys the Citarasa engineering, a methodology that focuses on the provision of the appropriate characterizations on customer data in order to associate them with customer affective needs. Based on the application of classification techniques we build a recommendation engine, which is evaluated in terms of user satisfaction, tool’s effectiveness, usefulness and reliability among other parameters.