An empirical study on the effect of data sparsity and data overlap on cross domain collaborative filtering performance

In the present day, the oversaturation of data has complicated the process of finding information from a data source. Recommender systems aim to alleviate this problem in various domains by actively suggesting selective information to potential users based on their personal preferences. Amongst these approaches, collaborative filtering based recommenders (CF recommenders), which make use of users’ implicit and explicit ratings for items, are widely regarded as the most successful type of recommender system. However, CF recommenders are sensitive to issues caused by data sparsity, where users rate very few items, or items receive very few ratings from users, meaning there is not enough data to give a recommendation. The majority of studies have attempted to solve these issues by focusing on developing new algorithms within a single domain. Recently, cross-domain recommenders that use multiple domain datasets have attracted increasing attention amongst the research community. Cross-domain recommenders assume that users who express their preferences in one domain (called the target domain) will also express their preferences in another domain (called the source domain), and that these additional preferences will improve precision and recall of recommendations to the user. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of various data sparsity and data overlap issues on the performance of cross-domain CF recommenders, using various aggregation functions. In this study, several different cross-domain recommenders were created by collecting three datasets from three separate domains of a large Korean fashion company and combining them with different algorithms and different aggregation approaches. The cross-recommenders that used high performance, high overlap domains showed significant improvement of precision and recall of recommendation when the recommendation scores of individual domains were combined using the summation aggregation function. However, the cross-recommenders that used low performance, low overlap domains showed little or no performance improvement in all areas. This result implies that the use of cross-domain recommenders do not guarantee performance improvement, rather that it is necessary to consider relevant factors carefully to achieve performance improvement when using cross-domain recommenders.     

Cluster ensembles in collaborative filtering recommendation

Recommender systems, which recommend items of information that are likely to be of interest to the users, and filter out less favored data items, have been developed. Collaborative filtering is a widely used recommendation technique. It is based on the assumption that people who share the same preferences on some items tend to share the same preferences on other items. Clustering techniques are commonly used for collaborative filtering recommendation. While cluster ensembles have been shown to outperform many single clustering techniques in the literature, the performance of cluster ensembles for recommendation has not been fully examined. Thus, the aim of this paper is to assess the applicability of cluster ensembles to collaborative filtering recommendation. In particular, two well-known clustering techniques (self-organizing maps (SOM) and k-means), and three ensemble methods (the cluster-based similarity partitioning algorithm (CSPA), hypergraph partitioning algorithm (HGPA), and majority voting) are used. The experimental results based on the Movielens dataset show that cluster ensembles can provide better recommendation performance than single clustering techniques in terms of recommendation accuracy and precision. In addition, there are no statistically significant differences between either the three SOM ensembles or the three k-means ensembles. Either the SOM or k-means ensembles could be considered in the future as the baseline collaborative filtering technique.     

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.     

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.     

Knowledge-based recommendation: a review of ontology-based recommender systems for e-learning

Recommender systems in e-learning domain play an important role in assisting the learners to find useful and relevant learning materials that meet their learning needs. Personalized intelligent agents and recommender systems have been widely accepted as solutions towards overcoming information retrieval challenges by learners arising from information overload. Use of ontology for knowledge representation in knowledge-based recommender systems for e-learning has become an interesting research area. In knowledge-based recommendation for e-learning resources, ontology is used to represent knowledge about the learner and learning resources. Although a number of review studies have been carried out in the area of recommender systems, there are still gaps and deficiencies in the comprehensive literature review and survey in the specific area of ontology-based recommendation for e-learning. In this paper, we present a review of literature on ontology-based recommenders for e-learning. First, we analyze and classify the journal papers that were published from 2005 to 2014 in the field of ontology-based recommendation for e-learning. Secondly, we categorize the different recommendation techniques used by ontology-based e-learning recommenders. Thirdly, we categorize the knowledge representation technique, ontology type and ontology representation language used by ontology-based recommender systems, as well as types of learning resources recommended by e-learning recommenders. Lastly, we discuss the future trends of this recommendation approach in the context of e-learning. This study shows that use of ontology for knowledge representation in e-learning recommender systems can improve the quality of recommendations. It was also evident that hybridization of knowledge-based recommendation with other recommendation techniques can enhance the effectiveness of e-learning recommenders.     

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.     

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.     

基于模糊簇的个性化推荐方法

提出了一种运用模糊聚类方法将项目属性特征的相似性与协同过滤推荐算法相融合的推荐方法,此方法将用户对单个项目的偏好转化为对相似群组的偏好,目的是构造密集的用户-模糊簇的偏好信息,同时利用项目之间在相似群组的相似性来初步预测用户对未评价项目的评分,在此基础之上再完成基于用户的协同过滤推荐算法。实验结果表明,该方法确实可提高协同过滤推荐算法的推荐精度。     

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。     

Personalized News Recommendation: A Review and an Experimental Investigation

Online news articles,as a new format of press releases,have sprung up on the Internet.With its convenience and recency,more and more people prefer to read news online instead of reading the paper-format press releases.However,a gigantic amount of news events might be released at a rate of hundreds,even thousands per hour.A challenging problem is how to efficiently select specific news articles from a large corpus of newly-published press releases to recommend to individual readers,where the selected news items should match the reader’s reading preference as much as possible.This issue refers to personalized news recommendation.Recently,personalized news recommendation has become a promising research direction as the Internet provides fast access to real-time information from multiple sources around the world.Existing personalized news recommendation systems strive to adapt their services to individual users by virtue of both user and news content information.A variety of techniques have been proposed to tackle personalized news recommendation,including content-based,collaborative filtering systems and hybrid versions of these two.In this paper,we provide a comprehensive investigation of existing personalized news recommenders.We discuss several essential issues underlying the problem of personalized news recommendation,and explore possible solutions for performance improvement.Further,we provide an empirical study on a collection of news articles obtained from various news websites,and evaluate the effect of different factors for personalized news recommendation.We hope our discussion and exploration would provide insights for researchers who are interested in personalized news recommendation.     

一种基于改进的巴氏系数的协同过滤推荐算法

传统基于邻居的协同过滤推荐方法必须完全依赖用户共同评分项,且存在极为稀疏的数据集中预测准确性不高的问题。巴氏系数协同过滤算法通过利用一对用户的所有评分项进行相似性度量,可以有效改善上述问题。但该种方法也存在两个很明显的缺陷,即未考虑两个用户评分项个数不同时的情况以及没有针对性地考虑用户偏好。在巴氏系数协同过滤算法的基础上进行了改进,既能充分利用用户的所有评分信息,又考虑到用户对项目的积极评分偏好。实验结果表明,改进的巴氏系数协同过滤算法在数据集上获得了更好的推荐结果,提高了推荐的准确度。     

一种融合聚类与用户兴趣偏好的协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤推荐算法可以根据已知用户的偏好预测其可能感兴趣的项目,是现今最为成功、应用最广泛的推荐技术。然而,传统的协同过滤推荐算法受限于数据稀疏性问题,推荐结果较差。目前的协同过滤推荐算法大多只针对用户-项目评分矩阵进行数据分析,忽视了项目属性特征及用户对项目属性特征的偏好。针对上述问题,提出了一种融合聚类和用户兴趣偏好的协同过滤推荐算法。首先根据用户评分矩阵与项目类型信息,构建用户针对项目类型的用户兴趣偏好矩阵;然后利用K-Means算法对项目集进行聚类,并基于用户兴趣偏好矩阵查找待估值项所对应的近邻用户;在此基础上,通过结合项目相似度的加权Slope One算法在每一个项目类簇中对稀疏矩阵进行填充,以缓解数据稀疏性问题;进而基于用户兴趣偏好矩阵对用户进行聚类;最后,面向填充后的评分矩阵,在每一个用户类簇中使用基于用户的协同过滤算法对项目评分进行预测。实验结果表明,所提算法能够有效缓解原始评分矩阵的稀疏性问题,提升算法的推荐质量。     

协同过滤推荐系统综述

随着互联网和信息计算的飞速发展,衍生了海量数据,我们已经进入信息爆炸的时代。网络中各种信息量的指数型增长导致用户想要从大量信息中找到自己需要的信息变得越来越困难,信息过载问题日益突出。推荐系统在缓解信息过载问题中起着非常重要的作用,该方法通过研究用户的兴趣偏好进行个性化计算,由系统发现用户兴趣进而引导用户发现自己的信息需求。目前,推荐系统已经成为产业界和学术界关注、研究的热点问题,应用领域十分广泛。在电子商务、会话推荐、文章推荐、智慧医疗等多个领域都有所应用。传统的推荐算法主要包括基于内容的推荐、协同过滤推荐以及混合推荐。其中,协同过滤推荐是推荐系统中应用最广泛最成功的技术之一。该方法利用用户或物品间的相似度以及历史行为数据对目标用户进行推荐,因此存在用户冷启动和项目冷启动问题。此外,随着信息量的急剧增长,传统协同过滤推荐系统面对数据的快速增长会遇到严重的数据稀疏性问题以及可扩展性问题。为了缓解甚至解决这些问题,推荐系统研究人员进行了大量的工作。近年来,为了提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度,学者们开始关注推荐系统的多样性问题以及可解释性等问题。由于深度学习方法可以通过发现数据中用户和项目之间的非线性关系从而学习一个有效的特征表示,因此越来越受到推荐系统研究人员的关注。目前的工作主要是利用评分数据、社交网络信息以及其他领域信息等辅助信息,结合深度学习、数据挖掘等技术提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度。对此,本文首先对推荐系统以及传统推荐算法进行概述,然后重点介绍协同过滤推荐算法的相关工作。包括协同过滤推荐算法的任务、评价指标、常用数据集以及学者们在解决协同过滤算法存在的问题时所做的工作以及努力。最后提出未来的几个可研究方向。     

基于用户潜在偏好的协同过滤

提出了一种新的协同过滤模型,解决了不同用户在项目上,有相似的偏好、不同的评分习惯的问题。该模型可有效地改进传统协同过滤模型相似性度量方法,提高了用户相似性度量准确性。实验结果表明,该模型在个性化推荐系统应用中取得了较好的效果。     

Enhancing the diversity of conversational collaborative recommendations: a comparison

In conversational collaborative recommender systems, user feedback influences the recommendations. We report mechanisms for enhancing the diversity of the recommendations made by collaborative recommenders. We focus on techniques for increasing diversity that rely on collaborative data only. In our experiments, we compare different mechanisms and show that, if recommendations are diverse, users find target items in many fewer recommendation cycles.     

联合注意力和自编码器的协同过滤推荐

面对数量庞大的用户和物品数量,推荐系统通常面临着数据稀疏的问题,为缓解此问题,提出了一个融合注意力机制和自编码器的协同过滤模型。该模型将评分信息送入一个基于自编码器的协同过滤子模型中以挖掘用户整体偏好,同时将评分信息送入一个融合了注意力机制的基于物品的协同过滤子模型中以挖掘物品与物品之间的局部依赖信息,随后将两个子模型的结果相融合,拟合出最终的结果。模型在MovieLens和Pinterest数据集上进行了实验验证,实验结果与基准相比有所改善。     

基于双重最相关注意力网络的协同过滤推荐算法

基于项目的协同过滤从用户的历史交互项目中学习用户偏好,根据用户的偏好推荐相似的新项目。现有的协同过滤方法认为用户所交互的一组历史项目对用户的影响是相同的,并且将所有历史交互项目在对目标项目作预测时的贡献看作是相同的,导致这些推荐方法的准确性受限。针对上述问题,提出了一种基于双重最相关注意力网络的协同过滤推荐算法,该算法包含两层注意力网络。首先,使用项目级注意力网络为不同历史项目分配不同的权重来捕获用户历史交互项目中最相关的项目;然后,使用项目交互级注意力网络感知不同历史项目与目标项目之间的交互关联度;最后,通过两层注意力网络的使用来同时捕获用户在历史交互项目上和目标项目上的细粒度偏好,从而更好地进行下一步推荐工作。在MovieLens和Pinterest两个真实数据集上进行实验,实验结果表明,所提算法在推荐命中率上与基准模型基于深度学习的项目协同过滤（DeepICF）算法相比分别提升了2.3个百分点和1.5个百分点,验证了该算法在为用户进行个性化推荐上的有效性。     

Context-aware recommendation using rough set model and collaborative filtering

Context has been identified as an important factor in recommender systems. Lots of researches have been done for context-aware recommendation. However, in current approaches, the weights of contextual information are the same, which limits the accuracy of the results. This paper aims to propose a context-aware recommender system by extracting, measuring and incorporating significant contextual information in recommendation. The approach is based on rough set theory and collaborative filtering. It involves a three-steps process. At first, significant attributes to represent contextual information are extracted and measured to identify recommended items based on rough set theory. Then the users’ similarity is measured in a target context consideration. Furthermore collaborative filtering is adopted to recommend appropriate items. The evaluation experiments show that the proposed approach is helpful to improve the recommendation quality.     

基于双重最相关注意力网络的协同过滤推荐算法

基于项目的协同过滤从用户的历史交互项目中学习用户偏好，根据用户的偏好推荐相似的新项目。现有的协同过滤方法认为用户所交互的一组历史项目对用户的影响是相同的，并且将所有历史交互项目在对目标项目作预测时的贡献看作是相同的，导致这些推荐方法的准确性受限。针对上述问题，提出了一种基于双重最相关注意力网络的协同过滤推荐算法，该算法包含两层注意力网络。首先，使用项目级注意力网络为不同历史项目分配不同的权重来捕获用户历史交互项目中最相关的项目；然后，使用项目交互级注意力网络感知不同历史项目与目标项目之间的交互关联度；最后，通过两层注意力网络的使用来同时捕获用户在历史交互项目上和目标项目上的细粒度偏好，从而更好地进行下一步推荐工作。在MovieLens和Pinterest两个真实数据集上进行实验，实验结果表明，所提算法在推荐命中率上与基准模型基于深度学习的项目协同过滤（DeepICF）算法相比分别提升了2.3个百分点和1.5个百分点，验证了该算法在为用户进行个性化推荐上的有效性。     

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.