A hybrid approach for improving predictive accuracy of collaborative filtering algorithms

Recommender systems represent a class of personalized systems that aim at predicting a user’s interest on information items available in the application domain, operating upon user-driven ratings on items and/or item features. One of the most widely used recommendation methods is collaborative filtering that exploits the assumption that users who have agreed in the past in their ratings on observed items will eventually agree in the future. Despite the success of recommendation methods and collaborative filtering in particular, in real-world applications they suffer from the insufficient number of available ratings, which significantly affects the accuracy of prediction. In this paper, we propose recommendation approaches that follow the collaborative filtering reasoning and utilize the notion of lifestyle as an effective user characteristic that can group consumers in terms of their behavior as indicated in consumer behavior and marketing theory. Emanating from a basic lifestyle-based recommendation algorithm we incrementally proceed to the development of hybrid recommendation approaches that address certain dimensions of the sparsity problem and empirically evaluate them providing further evidence of their effectiveness.     

Graph-based collaborative ranking

Data sparsity, that is a common problem in neighbor-based collaborative filtering domain, usually complicates the process of item recommendation. This problem is more serious in collaborative ranking domain, in which calculating the users' similarities and recommending items are based on ranking data. Some graph-based approaches have been proposed to address the data sparsity problem, but they suffer from two flaws. First, they fail to correctly model the users' priorities, and second, they can't be used when the only available data is a set of ranking instead of rating values.In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based approach, called GRank, that is designed for collaborative ranking domain. GRank can correctly model users’ priorities in a new tripartite graph structure, and analyze it to directly infer a recommendation list. The experimental results show a significant improvement in recommendation quality compared to the state of the art graph-based recommendation algorithms and other collaborative ranking techniques.     

A hybrid collaborative filtering method for multiple-interests and multiple-content recommendation in E-Commerce

Recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making personalized recommendations for products or services during a live interaction. These systems, especially collaborative filtering based on user, are achieving widespread success on the Web. The tremendous growth in the amount of available information and the kinds of commodity to Web sites in recent years poses some key challenges for recommender systems. One of these challenges is ability of recommender systems to be adaptive to environment where users have many completely different interests or items have completely different content (We called it as Multiple interests and Multiple-content problem). Unfortunately, the traditional collaborative filtering systems can not make accurate recommendation for the two cases because the predicted item for active user is not consist with the common interests of his neighbor users. To address this issue we have explored a hybrid collaborative filtering method, collaborative filtering based on item and user techniques, by combining collaborative filtering based on item and collaborative filtering based on user together. Collaborative filtering based on item and user analyze the user-item matrix to identify similarity of target item to other items, generate similar items of target item, and determine neighbor users of active user for target item according to similarity of other users to active user based on similar items of target item.In this paper we firstly analyze limitation of collaborative filtering based on user and collaborative filtering based on item algorithms respectively and emphatically make explain why collaborative filtering based on user is not adaptive to Multiple-interests and Multiple-content recommendation. Based on analysis, we present collaborative filtering based on item and user for Multiple-interests and Multiple-content recommendation. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the results and compare them with collaborative filtering based on user and collaborative filtering based on item, respectively. The experiments suggest that collaborative filtering based on item and user provide better recommendation quality than collaborative filtering based on user and collaborative filtering based on item dramatically.     

An evolutionary approach for combining results of recommender systems techniques based on collaborative filtering

Recommender systems (RS) are often used as guides, helping users to discover products of their interest. Many techniques and approaches to generate an effective recommendation are available for the system designers. On the one hand, this is interesting because different application’s scenarios could have a fittest solution but on the other it can also cause some complexity to select the best technique to address at each state of the database. Thus, choose the best technique for each new state becomes too difficult and frequent for manually select. One of big challenges on RS is turn the techniques more useful for real-world scenarios. Therefore, automate or help the design decision is an important task to improve the usability of RS and reduce its cost. Although many works aims to improve the performance of RS for some scenarios, just a few of them try to help the designers on selection or combination of the techniques through applications’ state changes. Therefore, this work proposes an evolutionary approach, called Invenire, to automate the choice of techniques used by combining results of different recommendation techniques. This is a new approach that uses a search algorithm to optimize the techniques combination, and can inspire hybrid methods and expert systems on how automate them. To evaluate the proposal, experiments were performed with a dataset from MovieLens and different collaborative filtering approaches. The results obtained show that the Invenire outperforms all collaborative filtering approach separately in all contexts addressed. The improvement achieved varies from 3.6% to 118.99% depending on the combination encountered and the experiment executed. Thus, the proposal was able to increase the accuracy on the generated recommendations and automate the combinations of techniques.     

基于马尔可夫聚类和混合协同过滤的电视节目推荐

针对家庭用户的电视节目个性化推荐问题,提出一种基于马尔可夫聚类和混合协同过滤(MCL-HCF)算法的混合推荐方法。采用马尔可夫聚类对各个时间段的电视用户进行聚类,产生不同的群组,最小化每个群组里的个体成员和群组整体的偏好差异,再以群组为单位进行电视节目推荐;使用基于物品的协同过滤和基于用户的协同过滤算法分别产生推荐列表;采用基于加权融合的混合推荐算法对两个推荐列表进行处理,得到最终的混合推荐结果。在公开数据集上的实验结果表明,该算法在平衡推荐惊喜度和相关性的同时能够获得令人满意的推荐准确率。     

混合协同过滤算法中用户冷启动问题的研究

在推荐系统中,用户冷启动问题是传统协同过滤推荐系统中一直存在的问题。针对这个问题,在传统协同过滤算法的基础上,提出一种新的解决用户冷启动问题的混合协同过滤算法,该算法在计算用户相似性时引入用户信任机制和人口统计学信息,综合考虑用户的属性相似性和信任相似性。同时,算法还在用户近邻的选取上做了一些改进。实验表明该算法有效缓解了传统协同过滤推荐系统中的用户冷启动问题。     

A hybrid content-based and item-based collaborative filtering approach to recommend TV programs enhanced with singular value decomposition

With the advent of new cable and satellite services, and the next generation of digital TV systems, people are faced with an unprecedented level of program choice. This often means that viewers receive much more information than they can actually manage, which may lead them to believe that they are missing programs that could likely interest them. In this context, TV program recommendation systems allow us to cope with this problem by automatically matching user’s likes to TV programs and recommending the ones with higher user preference.This paper describes the design, development, and startup of queveo.tv: a Web 2.0 TV program recommendation system. The proposed hybrid approach (which combines content-filtering techniques with those based on collaborative filtering) also provides all typical advantages of any social network, such as supporting communication among users as well as allowing users to add and tag contents, rate and comment the items, etc. To eliminate the most serious limitations of collaborative filtering, we have resorted to a well-known matrix factorization technique in the implementation of the item-based collaborative filtering algorithm, which has shown a good behavior in the TV domain. Every step in the development of this application was taken keeping always in mind the main goal: to simplify as much as possible the user task of selecting what program to watch on TV.     

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.     

基于近邻评分填补的协同过滤推荐算法

评分数据的稀疏性影响协同过滤算法的推荐质量。为此,提出一种基于近邻评分填补的混合协同过滤推荐算法。对原始评分矩阵进行全局降维,在低维的主成分空间中计算用户相似性,减少算法复杂度。采用奇异值分解法对近邻评分缺失值进行填补,降低近邻评分的稀疏性。在MovieLens数据集上的实验结果表明,该算法具有较好的推荐效果。     

Hybrid Recommender Systems: Survey and Experiments

Recommender systems represent user preferences for the purpose of suggesting items to purchase or examine. They have become fundamental applications in electronic commerce and information access, providing suggestions that effectively 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 recommendation, including content-based, collaborative, knowledge-based and other techniques. To improve performance, these methods have sometimes been combined in hybrid recommenders. This paper surveys the landscape of actual and possible hybrid recommenders, and introduces a novel hybrid, EntreeC, a system that combines knowledge-based recommendation and collaborative filtering to recommend restaurants. Further, we show that semantic ratings obtained from the knowledge-based part of the system enhance the effectiveness of collaborative filtering.     

融合协同过滤与用户偏好的旅游组推荐方法

近年来，组推荐系统已经逐渐成为旅游推荐领域的研究热点之一。传统的推荐系统面临的数据稀疏性问题在组推荐系统中同样存在。基于评分的推荐系统中，可以把组推荐系统分为对单个用户的偏好预测和对组内成员预测结果的融合两个阶段。为提高推荐的效果，提出了一种融合协同过滤与用户偏好的旅游组推荐方法，它考虑了用户的预测评分和组推荐结果的准确性。在协同过滤中通过加入相似性影响因子和关联性因子进行预测评分，然后在均值策略和最小痛苦策略的基础上，提出了满意度平衡策略，该策略考虑了组内成员的局部满意度和整体满意度。实验表明，所提出的方法提高了推荐的准确率。     

一种使用DSmTrust信任模型的推荐系统

协同过滤是当前主要的推荐技术,它的主要缺点是稀疏和扩展性问题。提出了一种基于DSmTrust信任模型的推荐系统,利用信任的传递性解决稀疏问题,分布式的DSmTrust方法具有良好的扩展性。实验表明,新方法比协同过滤的覆盖率更高,比Massa的信任感知推荐方法的精度更高。     

基于协同过滤和标签的混合音乐推荐算法研究

结合音乐这一特定的推荐对象,针对传统单一的推荐算法不能有效解决音乐推荐中的准确度问题,提出一种协同过滤技术和标签相结合的音乐推荐算法。该算法先通过协同过滤技术确定相似用户,再通过相似用户对某一歌手的标签评分预测另一用户对该歌手的偏好程度,从而选择更符合用户喜好的音乐进行推荐,以此提升个性化推荐效率,为优化音乐推荐系统提供参考方法。     

基于社交用户标签的混合top-N推荐方法

针对协同过滤方法的冷启动问题,提出一种将社交用户标签与协同过滤相结合的混合top-N推荐方法。通过社交用户关系获得可信用户集,然后根据个性化标签采用结构上下文相似性算法(SimRank)计算社交用户相似近邻集并进行预测推荐,最后结合传统协同过滤方法进行推荐。实验结果表明,该方法能够提高在一般数据集及冷启动用户数据集下的推荐精度。     

协同过滤推荐系统中聚类搜索方法研究

最近邻计算是协同过滤方法中直接影响到推荐系统的运行效率和推荐准确率的重要一环。当用户和项目数目达到一定规模的时候,推荐系统的可扩展性明显降低。聚类的方法能在一定程度上弥补这个缺陷,但同时又会带来推荐准确性的下降。提出了一种与信息检索领域中的倒排索引相结合并采用“成员策略”的用户聚类搜索算法,缩短了最近邻计算的时间,实验的结果证明,该方法能在保证推荐正确性的前提下有效改善协同过滤推荐系统的可扩展性。     

基于增量协同过滤和潜在语义分析的混合推荐算法

为了解决传统新闻推荐系统定期更新推荐算法不能根据用户喜好的变化进而动态地调整推荐列表的问题,提出了一种混合推荐算法(IULSACF)。该算法包含了2个关键部分:基于项目的增量更新协同过滤算法和基于关键词频率的潜在语义分析算法。该混合推荐算法在基于项目的增量更新协同过滤模块中,通过对项目相似度列表增量更新来动态地调整推荐列表,并结合潜在语义分析算法来确保所推荐文章的相关性。实验结果表明,所提出的IULSACF算法在各项评价指标上均优于传统的推荐方法。     

A Multicriteria Collaborative Filtering Approach Using the Indifference Relation and its Application to Initiator Recommendation for Group-Buying

For recommender systems, the main aim of the popular collaborative filtering approaches is to recommend items that users with similar preferences have liked in the past. Single-criterion recommender systems have been successfully used in several applications. Because leveraging multicriteria information can potentially improve recommendation accuracy, multicriteria rating systems that allow users to assign ratings to various content attributes of items they have consumed have become the focus in recommendation systems. By treating the recommendation of items as a multicriteria decision problem, it is interesting to incorporate the preference relation of users of multicriteria decision making (MCDM) into the similarity measure for a collaborative filtering approach. For this, the well-known indifference relation can justify a discrimination or similarity between any two users, if outranking relation theory is incorporated. The applicability of the proposed single-criterion and multicriteria recommendation approaches to the recommendation of initiators on a group-buying website was examined. Experimental results have demonstrated that the generalization ability of the proposed multicriteria recommendation approach performs well in comparison to other single-criterion and multicriteria collaborative filtering approaches.     

基于Tag和协同过滤的混合推荐方法

针对传统协同过滤方法的稀疏性问题,提出基于标签(Tag)和协同过滤的混合推荐方法TAG-CF。通过Tag分类信息获取项目的最近邻居,采用基于项目的最近邻方法预测用户评分值,并利用该预测值填充用户评分矩阵,构造密集的伪矩阵,运用基于用户的的协同过滤方法在伪矩阵上计算用户对项目的预测评分值。实验结果表明,TAG-CF能有效降低推荐系统的平均绝对误差,提高推荐质量。     

A hybrid trust‐enhanced collaborative filtering recommendation approach for personalized government‐to‐business e‐services

The information overload on the World Wide Web results in the underuse of some existing e‐government services within the business domain. Small‐to‐medium businesses (SMBs), in particular, are seeking “one‐to‐one'' e‐services from government in current highly competitive markets, and there is an imperative need to develop Web personalization techniques to provide business users with information and services specific to their needs, rather than an undifferentiated mass of information. This paper focuses on how e‐governments can support businesses on the problem of selecting a trustworthy business partner to perform reliable business transactions. In the business partner selection process, trust or reputation information is crucial and has significant influence on a business user's decision regarding whether or not to do business with other business entities. For this purpose, an intelligent trust‐enhanced recommendation approach to provide personalized government‐to‐business (G2B) e‐services, and in particular, business partner recommendation e‐services for SMBs is proposed. Accordingly, in this paper, we develop (1) an implicit trust filtering recommendation approach and (2) an enhanced user‐based collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation approach. To further exploit the advantages of the two proposed approaches, we develop (3) a hybrid trust‐enhanced CF recommendation approach (TeCF) that integrates both the proposed implicit trust filtering and the enhanced user‐based CF recommendation approaches. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, especially the hybrid TeCF recommendation approach in terms of improving accuracy, as well as in dealing with very sparse data sets and cold‐start users. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

优化稀疏数据集提高协同过滤推荐系统质量的方法

协同过滤是目前个性化推荐系统中效果较好的一种推荐技术。由于用户和项目数量的急剧增加,使得反映用户喜好信息的评分矩阵非常稀疏,严重影响了协同过滤技术的推荐质量。针对这一问题提出了综合均值优化填充方法,该方法相比较于缺省值法和众数法,考虑到了用户评分尺度问题,同时也不存在众数法中的“多众数”和“无众数”问题。在同一数据集上,通过使用传统的基于用户的协同过滤算法进行验证,表明此方法可以有效提高推荐系统的推荐质量。