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.     

基于用户声誉的鲁棒协同推荐算法

随着推荐系统在电子商务界的快速发展以及取得的巨大经济收益, 有目的性的托攻击是目前协同过滤系统面临的重大安全威胁, 研究一种可抵御攻击的鲁棒推荐技术已成为目前推荐系统领域的重要课题.本文利用历史记录得到用户声誉, 建立声誉推荐系统, 并结合协同过滤推荐领域内的隐语义模型, 提出基于用户声誉的隐语义模型鲁棒协同算法.本文提出的算法从人为攻击和自然噪声两个方面对系统的鲁棒性进行了改善.在真实的数据集 Movielens 1M 上的实验表明, 与现有的鲁棒性推荐算法相比, 这种算法具有形式简单、可解释性强、稳定的特点, 且在精度得到一定提升的情况下大大增强了系统抵御攻击的能力.     

Improving sparsity and new user problems in collaborative filtering by clustering the personality factors

In collaborative filtering recommender systems, items recommended to an active user are selected based on the interests of users similar to him/her. Collaborative filtering systems suffer from the ‘sparsity’ and ‘new user’ problems. The former refers to the insufficiency of data about users’ preferences and the latter addresses the lack of enough information about the new-coming user. Clustering users is an effective way to improve the performance of collaborative filtering systems in facing the aforementioned problems. In previous studies, users were clustered based on characteristics such as ratings given by them as well as their age, gender, occupation, and geographical location. On the other hand, studies show that there is a significant relationship between users’ personality traits and their interests. To alleviate the sparsity and new user problems, this paper presents a new collaborative filtering system in which users are clustered based on their ‘personality traits’. In the proposed method, the personality of each user is described according to the big-5 personality model and users with similar personality are placed in the same cluster using K-means algorithm. The unknown ratings of the sparse user-item matrix are then estimated based on the clustered users, and recommendations are found for a new user according to a user-based approach which relays on the interests of the users with similar personality to him/her. In addition, for an existing user in the system, recommendations are offered in an item-based approach in which the similarity of items is estimated based on the ratings of users similar to him/her in personality. The proposed method is compared to some former collaborative filtering systems. The results demonstrate that in facing the data sparsity and new user problems, this method reduces the mean absolute error and improves the precision of the recommendations.     

An empirical study on user-topic rating based collaborative filtering methods

User based collaborative filtering (CF) has been successfully applied into recommender system for years. The main idea of user based CF is to discover communities of users sharing similar interests, thus, in which, the measurement of user similarity is the foundation of CF. However, existing user based CF methods suffer from data sparsity, which means the user-item matrix is often too sparse to get ideal outcome in recommender systems. One possible way to alleviate this problem is to bring new data sources into user based CF. Thanks to the rapid development of social annotation systems, we turn to using tags as new sources. In these approaches, user-topic rating based CF is proposed to extract topics from tags using different topic model methods, based on which we compute the similarities between users by measuring their preferences on topics. In this paper, we conduct comparisons between three user-topic rating based CF methods, using PLSA, Hierarchical Clustering and LDA. All these three methods calculate user-topic preferences according to their ratings of items and topic weights. We conduct the experiments using the MovieLens dataset. The experimental results show that LDA based user-topic rating CF and Hierarchical Clustering outperforms the traditional user based CF in recommending accuracy, while the PLSA based user-topic rating CF performs worse than the traditional user based CF.     

基于图游走的并行协同过滤推荐算法

针对目前协同过滤推荐算法存在的数据稀疏性问题和可扩展性问题,本文进行了相关研究。针对稀疏性问题,在传统的皮尔逊相关相似度中引入交占比系数计算用户间直接相似度,该方法缓解了用户间共同评分项的占比问题;提出一种基于图游走的间接相似度计算方法,该方法根据用户间的直接相似度建立用户网络图,在用户网络图上通过游走计算用户间的间接相似度,并进行推荐。在Spark平台上实现本文方法的并行化,缓解了数据规模增加带来的可扩展性问题。实验结果表明:本文提出的算法在不同数据集上均取得了良好效果,有效地提高了推荐准确度,并且在分布式环境下具有良好的可扩展性。     

An improved collaborative movie recommendation system using computational intelligence

Recommendation systems have become prevalent in recent years as they dealing with the information overload problem by suggesting users the most relevant products from a massive amount of data. For media product, online collaborative movie recommendations make attempts to assist users to access their preferred movies by capturing precisely similar neighbors among users or movies from their historical common ratings. However, due to the data sparsely, neighbor selecting is getting more difficult with the fast increasing of movies and users. In this paper, a hybrid model-based movie recommendation system which utilizes the improved K-means clustering coupled with genetic algorithms (GAs) to partition transformed user space is proposed. It employs principal component analysis (PCA) data reduction technique to dense the movie population space which could reduce the computation complexity in intelligent movie recom-mendation as well. The experiment results on Movielens dataset indicate that the proposed approach can provide high performance in terms of accuracy, and generate more reliable and personalized movie recommendations when compared with the existing methods.     

一种面向协同过滤的快速最近邻居搜索方法

针对协同过滤模型中寻找邻居集耗时,且部分邻居信息未能有效用于预测计算的问题,提出了一种快速搜寻最近邻居的方法。该方法改变了评分矩阵中数据组织方式,通过构建项目的用户评分列表和用户的项目评分列表,以此来筛选出对预测评分值产生影响的用户或项目,进而得到目标用户或项目的邻居集。该方法排除了不必要的相似性计算,提高了运算效率;而且还有效保证了预测计算中的邻居利用率,提高了推荐质量。在Movielens100k与Movielens1M两个数据集上的实验结果表明,所提出算法在运行时间、MAE、RMSE、F1值四个指标上均有较大提升。因此该算法在推荐系统领域具有良好的应用价值。     

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.     

The effects of transparency on trust in and acceptance of a content-based art recommender

The increasing availability of (digital) cultural heritage artefacts offers great potential for increased access to art content, but also necessitates tools to help users deal with such abundance of information. User-adaptive art recommender systems aim to present their users with art content tailored to their interests. These systems try to adapt to the user based on feedback from the user on which artworks he or she finds interesting. Users need to be able to depend on the system to competently adapt to their feedback and find the artworks that are most interesting to them. This paper investigates the influence of transparency on user trust in and acceptance of content-based recommender systems. A between-subject experiment (N = 60) evaluated interaction with three versions of a content-based art recommender in the cultural heritage domain. This recommender system provides users with artworks that are of interest to them, based on their ratings of other artworks. Version 1 was not transparent, version 2 explained to the user why a recommendation had been made and version 3 showed a rating of how certain the system was that a recommendation would be of interest to the user. Results show that explaining to the user why a recommendation was made increased acceptance of the recommendations. Trust in the system itself was not improved by transparency. Showing how certain the system was of a recommendation did not influence trust and acceptance. A number of guidelines for design of recommender systems in the cultural heritage domain have been derived from the study’s results.

Collaborative user modeling with user-generated tags for social recommender systems

With the popularity of social media services, the sheer amount of content is increasing exponentially on the Social Web that leads to attract considerable attention to recommender systems. Recommender systems provide users with recommendations of items suited to their needs. To provide proper recommendations to users, recommender systems require an accurate user model that can reflect a user’s characteristics, preferences and needs. In this study, by leveraging user-generated tags as preference indicators, we propose a new collaborative approach to user modeling that can be exploited to recommender systems. Our approach first discovers relevant and irrelevant topics for users, and then enriches an individual user model with collaboration from other similar users. In order to evaluate the performance of our model, we compare experimental results with a user model based on collaborative filtering approaches and a vector space model. The experimental results have shown the proposed model provides a better representation in user interests and achieves better recommendation results in terms of accuracy and ranking.     

融合用户兴趣和评分差异的协同过滤推荐算法

针对传统的协同过滤算法中单一评分相似性计算不准确的问题,提出融合用户兴趣和评分差异的协同过滤推荐算法。将TF-IDF思想运用到用户对标签的权重计算中,并使用指数衰减函数和时间窗口捕捉用户兴趣的变化;根据历史评分矩阵,充分考虑用户评分值差异、评判准则差异、影响力差异和项目影响差异等影响因子,定义了一种评分差异相似性度量算法;最后将用户兴趣相似性和评分差异相似性进行加权融合,获取更加准确的用户邻居,从而预测项目评分并进行推荐。在数据集Movielens的实验表明,提出的算法能有效提高推荐精度。     

基于改进Canopy聚类的协同过滤推荐算法

推荐系统通过建立用户和信息产品之间的二元关系,利用用户行为产生的数据挖掘每个用户感兴趣的对象并进行推荐,基于用户的协同过滤是近年来的主流办法,但存在一定局限性：推荐时需要考虑全部用户,而单个用户往往只与少部分用户类似。为了解决这个问题,提出了基于改进Canopy聚类的协同过滤推荐算法,将用户模型数据密度、距离与用户活跃度结合,计算用户数据权值,对用户模型数据进行聚类。由于结合了Canopy的聚类思想,同一用户可以属于不同的类,符合用户可能对多领域感兴趣的情况。最后对每个Canopy中的用户进行相应的推荐,根据聚类结果与用户评分预测用户可能感兴趣的对象。通过在数据集MovieLens和million songs上与对比算法进行MAE、RMSE、NDGG三个指标的比较,验证了该算法能显著提高推荐系统预测与推荐的准确度。     

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.     

基于检测响应的安全协同推荐系统研究

协同推荐系统广泛地应用于电子商务和信息访问系统,为新用户提供个性化的产品建议。然而,协同推荐系统存在着严重的安全隐患,使得恶意用户能够注入伪造的描述文件,影响或破坏提供给其他用户的推荐建议。本文探讨了检测响应描述文件注入攻击的方法,改进了协同过滤推荐算法,设计了基于检测响应方法的安全协同推荐系统框架。     

On the role of trust in collaborative Web search

Recommender systems combine ideas from information retrieval, user modelling, and artificial intelligence to focus on the provision of more intelligent and proactive information services. As such, recommender systems play an important role when it comes to assisting the user during both routine and specialised information retrieval tasks. Like any good assistant it is important that users can trust in the ability of a recommender system to respond with timely and relevant suggestions. In this paper, we will look at a collaborative recommendation system operating in the domain of Web search. We will show how explicit models of trust can help to inform more reliable recommendations that translate into more relevant search results. Moreover, we demonstrate how the availability of this trust-model facilitates important interface enhancements that provide a means to declare the provenance of result recommendations in a way that will allow searchers to evaluate their likely relevance based on the reputation and trustworthiness of the recommendation partners behind these suggestions.     

融合主题信息和卷积神经网络的混合推荐算法

针对传统的协同过滤算法中数据稀疏和推荐结果不准确的问题,提出了一种基于隐狄利克雷分布（LDA）与卷积神经网络（CNN）的概率矩阵分解推荐模型（LCPMF）,该模型综合考虑项目评论文档的主题信息与深层语义信息。首先,分别使用LDA主题模型和文本CNN对项目评论文档建模;然后,获取项目评论文档的显著潜在低维主题信息及全局深层语义信息,从而捕获项目文档的多层次特征表示;最后,将得到的用户和多层次的项目特征融合到概率矩阵分解（PMF）模型中,产生预测评分进行推荐。在真实数据集Movielens 1M、Movielens 10M与Amazon上,将LCPMF与经典的PMF、协同深度学习（CDL）、卷积矩阵因子分解模型（ConvMF）模型进行对比。实验结果表明,相较PMF、CDL、ConvMF模型,所提推荐模型LCPMF的均方根误差（RMSE）和平均绝对误差（MAE）在Movielens 1M数据集上分别降低了6.03%和5.38%、5.12%和4.03%、1.46%和2.00%,在Movielens 10M数据集上分别降低了5.35%和5.67%、2.50%和3.64%、1.75%和1.74%,在Amazon数据集上分别降低17.71%和23.63%、14.92%和17.47%、3.51%和4.87%,验证了所提模型在推荐系统中的可行性与有效性。     

Typicality‐based collaborative filtering for book recommendation

Nowadays, personalized recommender system placed an important role to predict the customer needs, interest about particular product in various application domains, which is identified according to the product ratings. During this process, collaborative filtering (CF) has been utilized because it is one of familiar techniques in recommender systems. The conventional CF methods analyse historical interactions of user‐item pairs based on known ratings and then use these interactions to produce recommendations. The major challenge in CF is that it needs to calculate the similarity of each pair of users or items by observing the ratings of users on same item, whereas the typicality‐based CF determines the neighbours from user groups based on their typicality degree. Typicality‐based CF can predict the ratings of users with improved accuracy. However, to eliminate the cold start problem in the proposed recommender system, the demographic filtering method has been employed in addition to the typicality‐based CF. A weighted average scheme has been applied on the combined recommendation results of both typicality‐based CF and demographic‐based CF to produce the best recommendation result for the user. Thereby, the proposed system has been able to achieve a coverage ratio of more than 95%, which indicates that the system is able to provide better recommendation for the user from the available lot of products.     

Sequence-based trust in collaborative filtering for document recommendation

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have emerged in various applications to support item recommendation, which solve the information-overload problem by suggesting items of interest to users. Recently, trust-based recommender systems have incorporated the trustworthiness of users into CF techniques to improve the quality of recommendation. They propose trust computation models to derive the trust values based on users' past ratings on items. A user is more trustworthy if s/he has contributed more accurate predictions than other users. Nevertheless, conventional trust-based CF methods do not address the issue of deriving the trust values based on users' various information needs on items over time. In knowledge-intensive environments, users usually have various information needs in accessing required documents over time, which forms a sequence of documents ordered according to their access time. We propose a sequence-based trust model to derive the trust values based on users' sequences of ratings on documents. The model considers two factors – time factor and document similarity – in computing the trustworthiness of users. The proposed model enhanced with the similarity of user profiles is incorporated into a standard collaborative filtering method to discover trustworthy neighbors for making predictions. The experiment result shows that the proposed model can improve the prediction accuracy of CF method in comparison with other trust-based recommender systems.     

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.