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.     

应用WUM和RBFN补值的协同过滤推荐研究

协同过滤是目前推荐系统中最为成功的一种方法,但面临稀疏数据特征时存在冷启动、稀疏性、可扩展性等问题。提出利用Web数据挖掘（WUM）获取隐性数据对显性用户评价矩阵进行补值,应用径向基函数（RBFN）对补值后的评价矩阵进一步进行平滑处理,得到消除稀疏性后的完全评价矩阵,基于完全评价矩阵利用协同过滤技术对相似用户进行聚类并实施推荐。实验评价结果表明该方法与传统协同过滤推荐方法相比,无论在推荐精度还是推荐相关性上都更为有效。     

Recommender system with grey wolf optimizer and FCM

Recommender systems are contributing a significant aspect in information filtering and knowledge management systems. They provide explicit and reliable recommendations to the users so that user can get information about all products in e-commerce domain. In the era of big data and large complex information delivery system, it is impossible to get the right information in the online environment. In this research work, we offered a novel movie-based collaborative recommender system which utilizes the bio-inspired gray wolf optimizer algorithm and fuzzy c-mean (FCM) clustering technique and predicts rating of a movie for a particular user based on his historical data and similarity of users. Gray wolf optimizer algorithm was applied on the Movielens dataset to obtain the initial clusters, and also the initial positions of clusters are obtained. FCM is used to classify the users in the dataset by similarity of user ratings. Our proposed collaborative recommender system performed extremely well with respect to accuracy and precision. We analyzed our proposed recommender system over Movielens dataset which is available publically. Various evaluation metrics were utilized such as mean absolute error, standard deviation, precision and recall. We also compared the performance of projected system with already established systems. The experiment results delivered by proposed recommender system demonstrated that efficiency and performance are enhanced and also offered better recommendations when compared with our previous work [1].

     

基于显式与隐式反馈信息的概率矩阵分解推荐

针对现有的基于用户显式反馈信息的推荐系统推荐准确率不高的问题,提出了一种基于显式与隐式反馈信息的概率矩阵分解推荐方法。该方法综合考虑了显示反馈信息和隐式反馈信息,在对用户信任关系矩阵和商品评分矩阵进行概率分解的同时加入了用户评分记录的隐式反馈信息,优化训练模型参数,为用户提供精确的预测评分。实验结果表明,该方法可以有效地获得用户偏好,产生大量的准确度高的推荐。     

An iterative semi-explicit rating method for building collaborative recommender systems

Collaborative filtering plays the key role in recent recommender systems. It uses a user-item preference matrix rated either explicitly (i.e., explicit rating) or implicitly (i.e., implicit feedback). Despite the explicit rating captures the preferences better, it often results in a severely sparse matrix. The paper presents a novel iterative semi-explicit rating method that extrapolates unrated elements in a semi-supervised manner. Extrapolation is simply an aggregation of neighbor ratings, and iterative extrapolations result in a dense preference matrix. Preliminary simulation results show that the recommendation using the semi-explicit rating data outperforms that of using the pure explicit data only.     

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.     

An analysis of peer similarity for recommendations in P2P systems

In this paper, we propose a novel recommender framework for partially decentralized file sharing Peer-to-Peer systems. The proposed recommender system is based on user-based collaborative filtering. We take advantage from the partial search process used in partially decentralized systems to explore the relationships between peers. The proposed recommender system does not require any additional effort from the users since implicit rating is used. The recommender system also does not suffer from the problems that traditional collaborative filtering schemes suffer from like the Cold start and the Data sparseness. To measure the similarity between peers, we propose Files?? Popularity Based Recommendation (FP) and Asymmetric Peers?? Similarity Based Recommendation with File Popularity (ASFP). We also investigate similarity metrics that were proposed in other fields and adapt them to file sharing P2P systems. We analyze the impact of each similarity metric on the accuracy of the recommendations. Both weighted and non weighted approaches were studied.     

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.     

EARS: Emotion-aware recommender system based on hybrid information fusion

Recommender systems suggest items that users might like according to their explicit and implicit feedback information, such as ratings, reviews, and clicks. However, most recommender systems focus mainly on the relationships between items and the user’s final purchasing behavior while ignoring the user’s emotional changes, which play an essential role in consumption activity. To address the challenge of improving the quality of recommender services, this paper proposes an emotion-aware recommender system based on hybrid information fusion in which three representative types of information are fused to comprehensively analyze the user’s features: user rating data as explicit information, user social network data as implicit information and sentiment from user reviews as emotional information. The experimental results verify that the proposed approach provides a higher prediction rating and significantly increases the recommendation accuracy.     

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.     

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.     

联邦推荐系统的协同过滤冷启动解决方法

基于联邦学习的推荐系统可以在保护用户隐私的情况下,联合多方数据,提升推荐系统的性能,已经成为推荐领域的研究热点之一.联邦协同过滤是联邦推荐系统中最经典及最常用的算法之一.然而,针对联邦协同过滤系统的冷启动问题的研究工作相对较少.针对这一问题,本文提出了一种基于安全内积协议的解决方案.具体地,在系统中添加新用户或新物品时...     

基于谱聚类和扩展朴素贝叶斯的混合推荐算法

随着电子商务的发展,基于协同过滤的推荐算法越来越受欢迎,与此同时,该算法的缺陷也越来越明显,如数据稀疏性、系统可扩展性等。为此,提出一种混合型推荐算法。该混合算法首先利用谱聚类方法,根据图谱理论将聚类问题转化为图的分割问题,寻找相似数据群;然后,利用扩展逻辑回归的朴素贝叶斯算法对聚类结果建立预测模型;最后使用增量式更新的方法,在不全部重新训练模型的基础上,对模型进行局部修改。实验结果表明,该算法较传统的协同过滤算法在一定程度上克服了数据稀疏性和冷启动问题,降低了计算复杂度,并且具有更好的准确性和可扩展性。     

Providing Justifications in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are gaining widespread acceptance in e-commerce applications to confront the “information overload” problem. Providing justification to a recommendation gives credibility to a recommender system. Some recommender systems (Amazon.com, etc.) try to explain their recommendations, in an effort to regain customer acceptance and trust. However, their explanations are not sufficient, because they are based solely on rating or navigational data, ignoring the content data. Several systems have proposed the combination of content data with rating data to provide more accurate recommendations, but they cannot provide qualitative justifications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that attains both accurate and justifiable recommendations. We construct a feature profile for the users to reveal their favorite features. Moreover, we group users into biclusters (i.e., groups of users which exhibit highly correlated ratings on groups of items) to exploit partial matching between the preferences of the target user and each group of users. We have evaluated the quality of our justifications with an objective metric in two real data sets (Reuters and MovieLens), showing the superiority of the proposed method over existing approaches.      

A Propound Hybrid Approach for Personalized Online Product Recommendations

ABSTRACT

The main aim of e-commerce websites is to turn their visitors into customers. For this purpose, recommender system is used as a tool that helps in turning clicks into purchases. Obtaining explicit ratings often faces problems such as authenticity of the ratings given by customers and queries that leads to low accuracy of the recommendations. Implicit ratings play a vital role in providing refined ranking of products. Preference level of the customers are predicted based on collaborative filtering (CF) approach using implicit details and mining click stream paths of like-minded users. Extracting the similarity among products using sequential patterns improves the accuracy of ranking. Integrating these two approaches improves the recommendation quality. Based on the results of experiment carried out to compare the performance of CF, sequential path of products viewed and integration of the two, we conclude that integration of mentioned approaches is superior to the existing ones.     

基于项目分类和用户群体兴趣的协同过滤算法

由于用户评分数据在极端稀疏的情况下会导致传统协同过滤算法的推荐质量下降,针对该问题,提出一种基于项目分类和用户群体兴趣的协同过滤算法。该算法根据项目类别信息对项目进行分类,相同分类的项目具有较高的相似性;利用评分数据计算各个项目分类上的用户相似性矩阵,并计算用户群体在各个分类上的兴趣,通过二者构造加权的用户相似性矩阵;利用用户加权相似性矩阵寻找用户的最近邻以获得最佳的推荐效果。实验结果表明,该算法能有效提高推荐质量。     

基于用户实时反馈的协同过滤算法

传统的基于内存的协同过滤算法存在可扩展性不足的问题,而基于模型的协同过滤算法由于模型数据的滞后,造成推荐质量不高。针对以上情况,提出一种基于用户实时反馈的协同过滤算法,该算法在用户提交项目评分之后能实现对推荐模型数据的实时更新,从而更精确地反映用户的兴趣变化。实验结果表明,该算法能够有效地提高推荐精确度并且大幅地缩短了推荐时间。     

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。     

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.     

基于统计过程控制的协同推荐攻击检测方法

针对恶意攻击者利用协同推荐系统用户偏好敏感的缺陷向系统中注入虚假数据破坏推荐结果真实性的问题,提出基于统计过程控制(SPC)的协同推荐攻击检测方法。该方法将用户概貌项目评价数偏离度作为服务质量控制属性构建休哈特控制图,利用判异规则检测攻击用户,从而完善协同推荐系统模型。实验证明这种检测方法对各种不同的攻击模型都有较高的检测准确率和查全率。