Recommender Systems Research: A Connection-Centric Survey

Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. While research in recommender systems grew out of information retrieval and filtering, the topic has steadily advanced into a legitimate and challenging research area of its own. Recommender systems have traditionally been studied from a content-based filtering vs. collaborative design perspective. Recommendations, however, are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users and social context. Therefore, ultimately all recommender systems make connections among people and thus should be surveyed from such a perspective. This viewpoint is under-emphasized in the recommender systems literature. We therefore take a connection-oriented perspective toward recommender systems research. We posit that recommendation has an inherently social element and is ultimately intended to connect people either directly as a result of explicit user modeling or indirectly through the discovery of relationships implicit in extant data. Thus, recommender systems are characterized by how they model users to bring people together: explicitly or implicitly. Finally, user modeling and the connection-centric viewpoint raise broadening and social issues—such as evaluation, targeting, and privacy and trust—which we also briefly address.     

社交媒体中的信息推荐

近年来社交媒体越来越流行,可以从中获得大量丰富多彩的信息的同时,也带来了严重的"信息过载"问题.推荐系统作为缓解信息过载最有效的方法之一,在社交媒体中的作用日趋重要.区别于传统的推荐方法,社交媒体中包含大量的用户产生内容,因此在社交媒体中,通过结合传统的个性化的推荐方法,集成各类新的数据、元数据和清晰的用户关系,产生了各种新的推荐技术.总结了社交推荐系统中的几个关键研究领域,包括基于社会化标注的推荐、组推荐和基于信任的推荐,之后介绍了在信息推荐中考虑时间因素时的情况,最后对社交媒体中信息推荐有待深入研究的难点和发展趋势进行了展望.     

Dual influence embedded social recommendation

Recommender systems are designed to solve the information overload problem and have been widely studied for many years. Conventional recommender systems tend to take ratings of users on products into account. With the development of Web 2.0, Rating Networks in many online communities (e.g. Netflix and Douban) allow users not only to co-comment or co-rate their interests (e.g. movies and books), but also to build explicit social networks. Recent recommendation models use various social data, such as observable links, but these explicit pieces of social information incorporating recommendations normally adopt similarity measures (e.g. cosine similarity) to evaluate the explicit relationships in the network - they do not consider the latent and implicit relationships in the network, such as social influence. A target user’s purchase behavior or interest, for instance, is not always determined by their directly connected relationships and may be significantly influenced by the high reputation of people they do not know in the network, or others who have expertise in specific domains (e.g. famous social communities). In this paper, based on the above observations, we first simulate the social influence diffusion in the network to find the global and local influence nodes and then embed this dual influence data into a traditional recommendation model to improve accuracy. Mathematically, we formulate the global and local influence data as new dual social influence regularization terms and embed them into a matrix factorization-based recommendation model. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effective performance of the proposed method.     

Personalized recommender system based on friendship strength in social network services

The rapid growth of social network services has produced a considerable amount of data, called big social data. Big social data are helpful for improving personalized recommender systems because these enormous data have various characteristics. Therefore, many personalized recommender systems based on big social data have been proposed, in particular models that use people relationship information. However, most existing studies have provided recommendations on special purpose and single-domain SNS that have a set of users with similar tastes, such as MovieLens and Last.fm; nonetheless, they have considered closeness relation. In this paper, we introduce an appropriate measure to calculate the closeness between users in a social circle, namely, the friendship strength. Further, we propose a friendship strength-based personalized recommender system that recommends topics or interests users might have in order to analyze big social data, using Twitter in particular. The proposed measure provides precise recommendations in multi-domain environments that have various topics. We evaluated the proposed system using one month's Twitter data based on various evaluation metrics. Our experimental results show that our personalized recommender system outperforms the baseline systems, and friendship strength is of great importance in personalized recommendation.     

基于极端评分行为的相似度计算

随着互联网技术的迅猛发展,互联网信息急剧增长,信息过载问题愈发凸显。面对海量的互联网信息,用户往往需要耗费大量的时间来搜索所需的信息或产品,而搜索的解往往受到制约。为解决信息过载问题,推荐系统应运而生。推荐系统根据用户的历史行为推测其需求、兴趣等,将用户感兴趣的信息、产品等推荐给用户。作为推荐领域中一类重要的推荐方法,基于记忆的协同过滤方法通常依据用户或产品的近邻信息来构造评分预测函数,其核心在于准确度量用户或产品之间的相似度。传统的相似度量,如皮尔逊、余弦及秩相关系数等,通常只考虑了用户之间的线性关系;而启发式相似度如基于3个特殊因子的PIP相似度及其改进方法,则只刻画了用户之间的非线性关系。事实上,在推荐系统中,就用户之间的相似关系而言,仅用线性或是非线性函数来度量均是不准确的。为了更为精细地刻画用户之间的相似程度,文中提出了基于非线性函数的用户极端评分行为的相似程度度量指数,通过将该指数融入传统的线性相关系数,构造了一个考虑极端评分行为的新的相似度。为验证该方法的有效性,基于Ml(100k)和Ml-latest-small两个数据集,将其与传统相似度以及启发式相似度进行比较,结果...     

TREPPS: A Trust-based Recommender System for Peer Production Services

Peer production, a new mode of production, is gradually shifting the traditional, capital-intensive wealth production to a model which heavily depends on information creating and sharing. More and more online users are relying on this type of services such as news, articles, bookmarks, and various user-generated contents around World Wide Web. However, the quality and the veracity of peers’ contributions are not well managed. Without a practical means to assess the quality of peer production services, the consequence is information-overloading. In this study, we present a recommender system based on the trust of social networks. Through the trust computing, the quality and the veracity of peer production services can be appropriately assessed. Two prominent fuzzy logic applications – fuzzy inference system and fuzzy MCDM method are utilized to support the decision of service choice. The experimental results showed that the proposed recommender system can significantly enhance the quality of peer production services and furthermore overcome the information overload problems. In addition, a trust-based social news system is built to demonstrate the application of the proposed system.     

基于用户信任和张量分解的社会网络推荐

社会化网络中的推荐系统可以在浩瀚的数据海洋中给用户推荐相关的信息。社会网络中用户之间的信任关系已经被用于推荐算法中,但是目前的基于信任的推荐算法都是单一的信任模型。提出了一种基于主题的张量分解的用户信任推荐算法,用来挖掘用户在不同的物品选取的时候对不同朋友的信任程度。由于社交网络更新速度快,鉴于目前的基于信任算法大都是静态算法,提出了一种增量更新的张量分解算法用于用户信任的推荐算法。实验结果表明：所提出的基于主题的用户信任推荐算法比现有算法具有更好的准确性,并且增量更新的推荐算法可以大幅度提高推荐算法在训练数据增加后的模型训练效率,适合更新速度快的社会化网络中的推荐任务。     

A novel social network hybrid recommender system based on hypergraph topologic structure

With the advent and popularity of social network, more and more people like to share their experience in social network. However, network information is growing exponentially which leads to information overload. Recommender system is an effective way to solve this problem. The current research on recommender systems is mainly focused on research models and algorithms in social networks, and the social networks structure of recommender systems has not been analyzed thoroughly and the so-called cold start problem has not been resolved effectively. We in this paper propose a novel hybrid recommender system called Hybrid Matrix Factorization(HMF) model which uses hypergraph topology to describe and analyze the interior relation of social network in the system. More factors including contextual information, user feature, item feature and similarity of users ratings are all taken into account based on matrix factorization method. Extensive experimental evaluation on publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed hybrid recommender system outperforms the existing recommender systems in tackling cold start problem and dealing with sparse rating datasets. Our system also enjoys improved recommendation accuracy compared with several major existing recommendation approaches.     

A balanced memory‐based collaborative filtering similarity measure

Collaborative filtering recommender systems contribute to alleviating the problem of information overload that exists on the Internet as a result of the mass use of Web 2.0 applications. The use of an adequate similarity measure becomes a determining factor in the quality of the prediction and recommendation results of the recommender system, as well as in its performance. In this paper, we present a memory‐based collaborative filtering similarity measure that provides extremely high‐quality and balanced results; these results are complemented with a low processing time (high performance), similar to the one required to execute traditional similarity metrics. The experiments have been carried out on the MovieLens and Netflix databases, using a representative set of information retrieval quality measures. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Privileged contextual information for context-aware recommender systems

A recommender system is used in various fields to recommend items of interest to the users. Most recommender approaches focus only on the users and items to make the recommendations. However, in many applications, it is also important to incorporate contextual information into the recommendation process. Although the use of contextual information has received great focus in recent years, there is a lack of automatic methods to obtain such information for context-aware recommender systems. Some works address this problem by proposing supervised methods, which require greater human effort and whose results are not so satisfactory. In this scenario, we propose an unsupervised method to extract contextual information from web page content. Our method builds topic hierarchies from page textual content considering, besides the traditional bag-of-words, valuable information of texts as named entities and domain terms (privileged information). The topics extracted from the hierarchies are used as contextual information in context-aware recommender systems. We conducted experiments by using two data sets and two baselines: the first baseline is a recommendation system that does not use contextual information and the second baseline is a method proposed in literature to extract contextual information. The results are, in general, very good and present significant gains. In conclusion, our method has advantages and innovations:(i) it is unsupervised; (ii) it considers the context of the item (Web page), instead of the context of the user as in most of the few existing methods, which is an innovation; (iii) it uses privileged information in addition to the existing technical information from pages; and (iv) it presented good and promising empirical results. This work represents an advance in the state-of-the-art in context extraction, which means an important contribution to context-aware recommender systems, a kind of specialized and intelligent system.     

Implicit feedback techniques on recommender systems applied to electronic books

The goal of this research is to define and capture a series of parameters that allowed us to perform a comparative analysis and find correlations between explicit and implicit feedback on recommender systems. Most of these systems require explicit actions from the users, such as rating, and commenting. In the context of electronic books this interaction may alter the patterns of reading and understanding of the users, as they are asked to stop reading and rate the content. By simulating the behavior of an electronic book reader we have improved the feedback process, by implicitly capturing, measuring, and classifying the information needed to discover user interests. In these times of information overload, we can now develop recommender systems that are mostly based on the user’s behavior, by relying on the obtained results.     

Learning social representations with deep autoencoder for recommender system

World Wide Web - With the development of online social media, it attracts increasingly attentions to utilize social information for recommender systems. Based on the intuition that users are...     

TAFFY: incorporating tag information into a diffusion process for personalized recommendations

The last few years have witnessed an explosion of information caused by the exponential growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, which confronted us with information overload and brought about an era of big data, appealing for efficient personalized recommender systems to assist the screening of useful information from various sources. As for a recommender system with more than the fundamental object-user rating information, such accessorial information as tags can be exploited and integrated into final ranking lists to improve recommendation performance. However, although existing studies have demonstrated that tags, as the additional yet useful resource, can be designed to improve recommendation performance, most network-based approaches take users, objects and tags as two bipartite graphs, or a tripartite graph, and therefore overlook either the important information among homogeneous nodes in each sub-graph, or the bipartite relations between users, objects or tags. Moreover, recent studies have suggested that the filtration of weak relationships in networks may reasonably enhance recommendation performance of collaborative filtering methods, and it has also been demonstrated that approaches based on the diffusion processes could more effectively capture relationships between objects and users, hence exhibiting higher performance than a typical collaborative filtering method. Based on these understandings, we propose a data fusion approach that integrates historical and tag data towards personalized recommendations. Our method coverts historical and tag data into complex networks, resorts to a diffusion kernel to measure the strength of associations between users and objects, and adopts Fisher’s combined probability test to obtain the statistical significance of such associations for personalized recommendations. We validate our approach via 10-fold cross-validation experiments. Results show that our method outperforms existing methods in not only the recommendation accuracy and diversity, but also retrieval performance. We further show the robustness of our method to related parameters.     

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。     

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.     

ERP 2.0, what for and how?

The poor level of adoption of ERP systems is often considered as linked to a loss of social interactions between users of the ERP, together with the poor adaptability of these huge systems to local needs. Web 2.0 tools (including among others social networks, wikis, mashups and tags) aim at allowing a better interaction between a user and an Internet site, or between communities of users by means of a Web site. Using these tools in an industrial context appears now as a possible solution for addressing some of the problems of present information systems, and especially ERPs. Examples of such integration of Web 2.0 technologies in industrial practices are analyzed and the empiricism with which these experiences are usually conducted is underlined. In order to address this problem, we suggest a step-by-step method allowing to identify on which business processes performed by an ERP the Web 2.0 tools could be of interest, and investigate how to integrate the two worlds. This approach is illustrated on the SAP product Business By Design, which new version includes a set of configurable Web 2.0 tools.     

A tourism destination recommender system using users’ sentiment and temporal dynamics

With the development and popularity of social networks, an increasing number of consumers prefer to order tourism products online, and like to share their experiences on social networks. Searching for tourism destinations online is a difficult task on account of its more restrictive factors. Recommender system can help these users to dispose information overload. However, such a system is affected by the issue of low recommendation accuracy and the cold-start problem. In this paper, we propose a tourism destination recommender system that employs opinion-mining technology to refine user sentiment, and make use of temporal dynamics to represent user preference and destination popularity drifting over time. These elements are then fused with the SVD+ + method by combining user sentiment and temporal influence. Compared with several well-known recommendation approaches, our method achieves improved recommendation accuracy and quality. A series of experimental evaluations, using a publicly available dataset, demonstrates that the proposed recommender system outperforms the existing recommender systems.     

Folksonomy‐Based Recommender Systems: A State‐of‐the‐Art Review

Collaborative tagging systems, also known as folksonomies, have grown in popularity over the Web on account of their simplicity to organize several types of content (e.g., Web pages, pictures, and video) using open‐ended tags. The rapid adoption of these systems has led to an increasing amount of users providing information about themselves and, at the same time, a growing and rich corpus of social knowledge that can be exploited by recommendation technologies. In this context, tripartite relationships between users, resources, and tags contained in folksonomies set new challenges for knowledge discovery approaches to be applied for the purposes of assisting users through recommendation systems. This review aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of folksonomy‐based recommender systems. Current recommendation approaches stemming from fields such as user modeling, collaborative filtering, content, and link‐analysis are reviewed and discussed to provide a starting point for researchers in the field as well as explore future research lines.     

A new collaborative filtering metric that improves the behavior of recommender systems

Recommender systems are typically provided as Web 2.0 services and are part of the range of applications that give support to large-scale social networks, enabling on-line recommendations to be made based on the use of networked databases. The operating core of recommender systems is based on the collaborative filtering stage, which, in current user to user recommender processes, usually uses the Pearson correlation metric. In this paper, we present a new metric which combines the numerical information of the votes with independent information from those values, based on the proportions of the common and uncommon votes between each pair of users. Likewise, we define the reasoning and experiments on which the design of the metric is based and the restriction of being applied to recommender systems where the possible range of votes is not greater than 5. In order to demonstrate the superior nature of the proposed metric, we provide the comparative results of a set of experiments based on the MovieLens, FilmAffinity and NetFlix databases. In addition to the traditional levels of accuracy, results are also provided on the metrics’ coverage, the percentage of hits obtained and the precision/recall.