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.     

考虑负相关性信息的协同过滤算法研究

为了研究Pearson负相关性信息对协同过滤算法的影响, 提出了一种考虑负相关性信息的协同过滤算法。该算法选取正相关用户作为最近邻居, 负相关用户作为最远邻居, 使用参数调节最近邻居和最远邻居在推荐过程中的作用。MovieLens数据集上的对比实验表明, 负相关性不仅可以提高推荐结果的准确性, 而且可以增加推荐列表的多样性; 进一步分析发现, 负相关性还可以大幅度提高不活跃用户的推荐准确性。该工作表明, 负相关性有助于解决推荐系统中准确性、多样性两难的问题和冷启动问题。     

基于slope one算法改进评分矩阵填充的协同过滤算法研究

为解决协同过滤算法中的数据稀疏性问题,提出了一种改进的协同过滤算法。该算法使用slope one算法计算出来的评分预测值来填充评分矩阵中的未评分项目,然后在填充后的用户-项目评分矩阵上通过基于用户的协同过滤方法给出推荐。利用slope one算法计算出来的评分预测值作为回填值,既能降低评分矩阵的稀疏性,也保证了回填值的多样性,从而减少均值、中值等单一填充值造成的推荐误差。在MovieLens-1M数据集上对本文改进算法和协同过滤算法及均值中心化处理的算法作五折交叉实验,结果表明,基于评分预测值填充数据后的协同过滤算法有效的缓解了数据稀疏性问题,并且有更好的推荐效果。     

Collaborative user modeling for enhanced content filtering in recommender systems

Recommender systems, which have emerged in response to the problem of information overload, provide users with recommendations of content suited to their needs. To provide proper recommendations to users, personalized recommender systems require accurate user models of characteristics, preferences and needs. In this study, we propose a collaborative approach to user modeling for enhancing personalized recommendations to users. Our approach first discovers useful and meaningful user patterns, and then enriches the personal model with collaboration from other similar users. In order to evaluate the performance of our approach, we compare experimental results with those of a probabilistic learning model, a user model based on collaborative filtering approaches, and a vector space model. We present experimental results that show how our model performs better than existing alternatives.     

结合项目流行度加权的协同过滤推荐算法

针对传统协同过滤算法中存在的流行度偏差问题,提出一种结合项目流行度加权的协同过滤推荐算法。在项目协同过滤算法的基础上,分析项目流行度和流行度差异对相似度的影响;设置流行度阈值,对大于该阈值的流行项目设计惩罚权重,降低其对项目间相似度的贡献。通过在MovieLens 1M和Epinion数据集上进行实验验证和对比,结果表明,所提算法的预测准确度和覆盖率均优于传统算法,有效提高了推荐的多样性和新颖性,一定程度上缓解了流行度偏差问题。     

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.     

基于加权三部图的协同过滤推荐算法

针对基于用户的协同过滤算法推荐结果过度集中在热门物品,导致多样性和新颖性较低、覆盖率较小的问题,文中提出基于加权三部图的协同过滤推荐算法.在分析数据稀疏和附加信息较少的基础上引入标签信息,可同时反映用户兴趣和物品属性,利用用户、物品和标签三元关系构建三部图.通过三部图网络映射到单模网络的方法获得用户偏好度,构建用户偏好度加权的三部图模型.根据热传导方法在加权三部图上进行资源重分配,挖掘更多的相似关系,利用协同过滤框架预测评分并进行推荐.在真实数据集上的实验表明,文中算法可较好地挖掘长尾物品,实现个性化推荐.     

Generalization of recommender systems: Collaborative filtering extended to groups of users and restricted to groups of items

In this paper we present a collaborative filtering method which opens up the possibilities of traditional collaborative filtering in two aspects: (1) it enables joint recommendations to groups of users and (2) it enables the recommendations to be restricted to items similar to a set of reference items. By way of example, a group of four friends could request joint recommendations of films similar to “Avatar” or “Titanic”. In the paper, using experiments, we show that the traditional approach of collaborative filtering does not satisfactorily resolve the new possibilities contemplated; we also provide a detailed formulation of the method proposed and an extensive set of experiments and comparative results which show the superiority of designed collaborative filtering compared to traditional collaborative filtering in: (a) number of recommendations obtained, (b) quality of the predictions, (c) quality of the recommendations. The experiments have been carried out on the databases Movielens and Netflix.     

Personalizing recommendation diversity based on user personality

In recent years, diversity has attracted increasing attention in the field of recommender systems because of its ability of catching users’ various interests by providing a set of dissimilar items. There are few endeavors to personalize the recommendation diversity being tailored to individual users’ diversity needs. However, they mainly depend on users’ behavior history such as ratings to customize diversity, which has two limitations: (1) They neglect taking into account a user’s needs that are inherently caused by some personal factors such as personality; (2) they fail to work well for new users who have little behavior history. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes a generalized, dynamic personality-based greedy re-ranking approach to generating the recommendation list. On one hand, personality is used to estimate each user’s diversity preference. On the other hand, personality is leveraged to alleviate the cold-start problem of collaborative filtering recommendations. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms related methods (including both non-diversity-oriented and diversity-oriented methods) in terms of metrics measuring recommendation accuracy and personalized diversity degree, especially in the cold-start setting.     

基于覆盖约简的个性化协同过滤推荐方法

协同过滤(CF)无法同时提供高精度和多样化的个性化推荐.基于此情况,文中提出基于覆盖约简的协同过滤方法(CRCF).结合覆盖粗糙集中的覆盖约简算法与CF中的用户约简,匹配覆盖中的冗余元素与邻近用户中的冗余用户,利用覆盖约简算法将冗余用户从目标用户的邻近用户中移除,保证CF中邻近用户的高效性.在公开数据集上的实验表明,在稀疏数据环境下,CRCF可以同时为目标用户提供高精度和多样化的个性化推荐.     

User Personality and User Satisfaction with Recommender Systems

In this study, we show that individual users’ preferences for the level of diversity, popularity, and serendipity in recommendation lists cannot be inferred from their ratings alone. We demonstrate that we can extract strong signals about individual preferences for recommendation diversity, popularity and serendipity by measuring their personality traits. We conducted an online experiment with over 1,800 users for six months on a live recommendation system. In this experiment, we asked users to evaluate a list of movie recommendations with different levels of diversity, popularity, and serendipity. Then, we assessed users’ personality traits using the Ten-item Personality Inventory (TIPI). We found that ratings-based recommender systems may often fail to deliver preferred levels of diversity, popularity, and serendipity for their users (e.g. users with high-serendipity preferences). We also found that users with different personalities have different preferences for these three recommendation properties. Our work suggests that we can improve user satisfaction when we integrate users’ personality traits into the process of generating recommendations.     

Novel Positive Multi-Layer Graph Based Method for Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems

Recommender systems play an increasingly important role in a wide variety of applications to help users find favorite products. Collaborative filtering has remarkable success in terms of accuracy and becomes one of the most popular recommendation methods. However, these methods have shown unpretentious performance in terms of novelty, diversity, and coverage. We propose a novel graph-based collaborative filtering method, namely Positive Multi-Layer Graph-Based Recommender System (PMLG-RS). PMLG-RS involves a positive multi-layer graph and a path search algorithm to generate recommendations. The positive multi-layer graph consists of two connected layers: the user and item layers. PMLG-RS requires developing a new path search method that finds the shortest path with the highest cost from a source node to every other node. A set of experiments are conducted to compare the PMLG-RS with well-known recommendation methods based on three benchmark datasets, MovieLens-100K, MovieLens-Last, and Film Trust. The results demonstrate the superiority of PMLG-RS and its high capability in making relevant, novel, and diverse recommendations for users.

     

Trust-Based Personalized Service Recommendation: A Network Perspective简

Recent years have witnessed a growing trend of Web services on the Interact. There is a great need of effective service recommendation mechanisms. Existing methods mainly focus on the properties of individual Web services （e.g., func- tional and non-functional properties） but largely ignore users＇ views on services, thus failing to provide personalized service recommendations. In this paper, we study the trust relationships between users and Web services using network modeling and analysis techniques. Based on the findings and the service network model we build, we then propose a collaborative filtering algorithm called Trust-Based Service Recommendation （TSR） to provide personalized service recommendations. This systematic approach for service network modeling and analysis can also be used for other service recommendation studies.     

A hybrid recommender system using artificial neural networks

In the context of recommendation systems, metadata information from reviews written for businesses has rarely been considered in traditional systems developed using content-based and collaborative filtering approaches. Collaborative filtering and content-based filtering are popular memory-based methods for recommending new products to the users but suffer from some limitations and fail to provide effective recommendations in many situations. In this paper, we present a deep learning neural network framework that utilizes reviews in addition to content-based features to generate model based predictions for the business-user combinations. We show that a set of content and collaborative features allows for the development of a neural network model with the goal of minimizing logloss and rating misclassification error using stochastic gradient descent optimization algorithm. We empirically show that the hybrid approach is a very promising solution when compared to standalone memory-based collaborative filtering method.     

融合信任因子的多样化电影推荐算法

传统的协同过滤算法过于依赖用户之间的评分,容易出现冷启动和数据稀疏性问题,同时推荐结果单一,针对以上问题,本文提出了一种融合信任因子的多样化电影推荐算法.首先对用户相似度计算方法进行改进,引入用户间信任度关系和属性特征信息.接着使用聚类方法把具有相同兴趣的用户划分在同一社群.最后在评分时综合考虑用户活跃度对电影的推荐度,引入惩罚因子,从而为目标用户提供个性化、多样化的电影推荐.实验结果表明,本文提出的算法在推荐精度和多样性指标上均有所提高,有较好的推荐效果.     

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.     

Subprofile-aware diversification of recommendations

A user of a recommender system is more likely to be satisfied by one or more of the recommendations if each individual recommendation is relevant to her but additionally if the set of recommendations is diverse. The most common approach to recommendation diversification uses re-ranking: the recommender system scores a set of candidate items for relevance to the user; it then re-ranks the candidates so that the subset that it will recommend achieves a balance between relevance and diversity. Ordinarily, we expect a trade-off between relevance and diversity: the diversity of the set of recommendations increases by including items that have lower relevance scores but which are different from the items already in the set. In early work, the diversity of a set of recommendations was given by the average of their distances from one another, according to some semantic distance metric defined on item features such as movie genres. More recent intent-aware diversification methods formulate diversity in terms of coverage and relevance of aspects. The aspects are most commonly defined in terms of item features. By trying to ensure that the aspects of a set of recommended items cover the aspects of the items in the user’s profile, the level of diversity is more personalized. In offline experiments on pre-collected datasets, intent-aware diversification using item features as aspects sometimes defies the relevance/diversity trade-off: there are configurations in which the recommendations exhibits increases in both relevance and diversity. In this paper, we present a new form of intent-aware diversification, which we call SPAD (Subprofile-Aware Diversification), and a variant called RSPAD (Relevance-based SPAD). In SPAD, the aspects are not item features; they are subprofiles of the user’s profile. We present and compare a number of different ways to extract subprofiles from a user’s profile. None of them is defined in terms of item features. Therefore, SPAD is useful even in domains where item features are not available or are of low quality. On three pre-collected datasets from three different domains (movies, music artists and books), we compare SPAD and RSPAD to intent-aware methods in which aspects are item features. We find on these datasets that SPAD and RSPAD suffer even less from the relevance/diversity trade-off: across all three datasets, they increase both relevance and diversity for even more configurations than other approaches to diversification. Moreover, we find that SPAD and RSPAD are the most accurate systems across all three datasets.

     

Cyber-physical-social collaborative sensing: from single space to cross-space

The development of wireless sensor networking, social networking, and wearable sensing techniques has advanced the boundaries of research on understanding social dynamics. Collaborative sensing, which utilizes diversity sensing and computing abilities across different entities, has become a popular sensing and computing paradigm. In this paper, we first review the history of research in collaborative sensing, which mainly refers to single space collaborative sensing that consists of physical, cyber, and social collaborative sensing. Afterward, we extend this concept into cross-space collaborative sensing and propose a general reference framework to demonstrate the distinct mechanism of cross-space collaborative sensing. We also review early works in cross-space collaborative sensing, and study the detail mechanism based on one typical research work. Finally, although cross-space collaborative sensing is a promising research area, it is still in its infancy. Thus, we identify some key research challenges with potential technical details at the end of this paper.     

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.     

Detection of the customer time-variant pattern for improving recommender systems

Due to the explosion of e-commerce, recommender systems are rapidly becoming a core tool to accelerate cross-selling and strengthen customer loyalty. There are two prevalent approaches for building recommender systems—content-based recommending and collaborative filtering. So far, collaborative filtering recommender systems have been very successful in both information filtering and e-commerce domains. However, the current research on recommendation has paid little attention to the use of time-related data in the recommendation process. Up to now there has not been any study on collaborative filtering to reflect changes in user interest.This paper suggests a methodology for detecting a user's time-variant pattern in order to improve the performance of collaborative filtering recommendations. The methodology consists of three phases of profiling, detecting changes, and recommendations. The proposed methodology detects changes in customer behavior using the customer data at different periods of time and improves the performance of recommendations using information on changes.