Integrating Collaborative and Reclusive Methods for Effective Recommendations: A Fuzzy Bayesian Approach

Collaborative filtering (CF), the most successful and widely used technique, recommends items based on the preferences of similar users. The main potentials of CF are its cross‐genre recommendation ability, and that it is completely independent of representation of the items being recommended. However, CF suffers from sparsity and cold start problems. On the other hand, a highly effective variant of content‐based filtering (CBF), reclusive methods (RMs) based on the preference of the single individual for whom recommendations to be made, provides a methodology that considers uncertainty and the multivalued nature of item features as well as user preferences in a content‐based framework using fuzzy logic approaches. The adoption of RM paradigm has several advantages when compared to CF such as sparsity and new item problem, but it suffers from overspecialization and limited content analysis. In view of the complementary nature of CF and RM, we develop a hybrid recommender system (RS) that helps in alleviating aforementioned problems in each approach. First, we propose fuzzy naïve Bayesian classifier based CF (FNB‐CF) and RM (FNB‐RM) for handling correlation‐based similarity problems. To overcome individual weaknesses of FNB‐CF and FNB‐RM, we develop a hybrid RS, FNB‐CF‐RM. Effectiveness of our proposed hybrid RS is demonstrated through experimental results using the MovieLens and IMDb data sets.     

Userrank for item-based collaborative filtering recommendation

With the recent explosive growth of the Web, recommendation systems have been widely accepted by users. Item-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most popular approaches for determining recommendations. A common problem of current item-based CF approaches is that all users have the same weight when computing the item relationships. To improve the quality of recommendations, we incorporate the weight of a user, userrank, into the computation of item similarities and differentials. In this paper, a data model for userrank calculations, a PageRank-based user ranking approach, and a userrank-based item similarities/differentials computing approach are proposed. Finally, the userrank-based approaches improve the recommendation results of the typical Adjusted Cosine and Slope One item-based CF approaches.     

基于多数据源和联合聚类的智能推荐

随着Internet的普及和电子商务的盛行,智能推荐系统也应运而生.协同推荐是目前公认为最好的一种推荐技术,但其存在着一些不足之处,如:稀疏性、可扩展性和冷启动问题.本文提出一种混合推荐技术来克服协同过滤的不足.首先,通过引入多个数据源对评价矩阵进行平滑填充来解决数据的稀疏性问题.其次,采用从用户和项目两方面进行联合聚类来提高系统的可扩展性和精度.实验结果证明,该方法在很大程度上较传统的协同过滤方法推荐精度高,且在线推荐的速度快.     

Hybrid recommendations for mobile commerce based on mobile phone features

Mobile data communications have evolved as the number of third generation (3G) subscribers has increased. The evolution has triggered an increase in the use of mobile devices, such as mobile phones, to conduct mobile commerce and mobile shopping on the mobile web. There are fewer products to browse on the mobile web; hence, one‐to‐one marketing with product recommendations is important. Typical collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation systems make recommendations to potential customers based on the purchase behaviour of customers with similar preferences. However, this method may suffer from the so‐called sparsity problem, which means there may not be sufficient similar users because the user‐item rating matrix is sparse. In mobile shopping environments, the features of users' mobile phones provide different functionalities for using mobile services; thus, the features may be used to identify users with similar purchase behaviour. In this paper, we propose a mobile phone feature (MPF)‐based hybrid method to resolve the sparsity issue of the typical CF method in mobile environments. We use the features of mobile phones to identify users' characteristics and then cluster users into groups with similar interests. The hybrid method combines the MPF‐based method and a preference‐based method that uses association rule mining to extract recommendation rules from user groups and make recommendations. Our experiment results show that the proposed hybrid method performs better than other recommendation methods.     

Exploiting interactions of review text,hidden user communities and item groups,and time for collaborative filtering

Rich side information concerning users and items are valuable for collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms for recommendation. For example, rating score is often associated with a piece of review text, which is capable of providing valuable information to reveal the reasons why a user gives a certain rating. Moreover, the underlying community and group relationship buried in users and items are potentially useful for CF. In this paper, we develop a new model to tackle the CF problem which predicts user’s ratings on previously unrated items by effectively exploiting interactions among review texts as well as the hidden user community and item group information. We call this model CMR (co-clustering collaborative filtering model with review text). Specifically, we employ the co-clustering technique to model the user community and item group, and each community–group pair corresponds to a co-cluster, which is characterized by a rating distribution in exponential family and a topic distribution. We have conducted extensive experiments on 22 real-world datasets, and our proposed model CMR outperforms the state-of-the-art latent factor models. Furthermore, both the user’s preference and item profile are drifting over time. Dynamic modeling the temporal changes in user’s preference and item profiles are desirable for improving a recommendation system. We extend CMR and propose an enhanced model called TCMR to consider time information and exploit the temporal interactions among review texts and co-clusters of user communities and item groups. In this TCMR model, each community–group co-cluster is characterized by an additional beta distribution for time modeling. To evaluate our TCMR model, we have conducted another set of experiments on 22 larger datasets with wider time span. Our proposed model TCMR performs better than CMR and the standard time-aware recommendation model on the rating score prediction tasks. We also investigate the temporal effect on the user–item co-clusters.     

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.     

一种优化聚类的协同过滤推荐算法

针对传统的协同过滤推荐算法存在评分数据稀疏和推荐准确率偏低的问题,提出了一种优化聚类的协同过滤推荐算法。根据用户的评分差异对原始评分矩阵进行预处理,再将得到的用户项目评分矩阵以及项目类型矩阵构造用户类别偏好矩阵,更好反映用户的兴趣偏好,缓解数据的稀疏性。在该矩阵上利用花朵授粉优化的模糊聚类算法对用户聚类,增强用户的聚类效果,并将项目偏好信息的相似度与项目评分矩阵的相似度进行加权求和,得到多个最近邻居。融合时间因素对目标用户进行项目评分预测,改善用户兴趣变化对推荐效果的影响。通过在MovieLens 100k数据集上实验结果表明,提出的算法缓解了数据的稀疏性问题,提高了推荐的准确性。     

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.     

融合用户自然最近邻的协同过滤推荐算法

现有的基于近邻的协同过滤推荐方法如基于KNN、基于K-means的协同过滤推荐常用来预测用户评分,但该方法确定邻居个数K非常困难且推荐准确率不高,难以达到理想推荐效果。从选择邻居用户这一角度出发,提出一种融合用户自然最近邻的协同过滤推荐算法（Collaborative Filtering recommendation integrating user-centric Natural Nearest Neighbor,CF3N）,该算法首先自适应地寻找目标用户的自然最近邻居集,再融合目标用户的自然最近邻居集与活动近邻用户集,使用融合后得到的邻居集合预测目标用户评分。实验使用了MovieLens数据集,以RMSE和MAE为评测标准,比较CF3N、CF-KNN与INS-CF算法,结果显示在电影领域该算法的推荐准确率有显著提高。     

A WEB‐BASED PERSONALIZED BUSINESS PARTNER RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TECHNIQUES

The web provides excellent opportunities to businesses in various aspects of development such as finding a business partner online. However, with the rapid growth of web information, business users struggle with information overload and increasingly find it difficult to locate the right information at the right time. Meanwhile, small and medium businesses (SMBs), in particular, are seeking “one‐to‐one” e‐services from government in current highly competitive markets. How can business users be provided with information and services specific to their needs, rather than an undifferentiated mass of information? An effective solution proposed in this study is the development of personalized e‐services. Recommender systems is an effective approach for the implementation of Personalized E‐Service which has gained wide exposure in e‐commerce in recent years. Accordingly, this paper first presents a hybrid fuzzy semantic recommendation (HFSR) approach which combines item‐based fuzzy semantic similarity and item‐based fuzzy collaborative filtering (CF) similarity techniques. This paper then presents the implementation of the proposed approach into an intelligent recommendation system prototype called Smart BizSeeker, which can recommend relevant business partners to individual business users, particularly for SMBs. Experimental results show that the HFSR approach can help overcome the semantic limitations of classical CF‐based recommendation approaches, namely sparsity and new “cold start” item problems.     

Recommendation using DMF-based fine tuning method

Recommender Systems (RS) have been comprehensively analyzed in the past decade, Matrix Factorization (MF)-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) method has been proved to be an useful model to improve the performance of recommendation. Factors that inferred from item rating patterns shows the vectors which are useful for MF to characterize both items and users. A recommendation can concluded from good correspondence between item and user factors. A basic MF model starts with an object function, which is consisted of the squared error between original training matrix and predicted matrix as well as the regularization term (regularization parameters). To learn the predicted matrix, recommender systems minimize the squared error which has been regularized. However, two important details have been ignored: (1) the predicted matrix will be more and more accuracy as the iterations carried out, then a fix value of regularization parameters may not be the most suitable choice. (2) the final distribution trend of ratings of predicted matrix is not similar with the original training matrix. Therefore, we propose a Dynamic-MF algorithm and fine tuning method which is quite general to overcome the mentioned detail problems. Some other information, such as social relations, etc, can be easily incorporated into this method (model). The experimental analysis on two large datasets demonstrates that our approaches outperform the basic MF-based method.     

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。     

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.     

耦合辅助信息的矩阵分解推荐模型

近十年来，协同过滤（CF）推荐系统成功地为用户提供了个性化的产品和服务。然而，用户—物品矩阵的稀疏性、推荐精度不高等问题仍然是一个挑战。针对这些问题，在矩阵分解模型基础上，提出了耦合用户和物品辅助信息的矩阵分解混合协同过滤框架；然后，基于此框架又提出了耦合物品属性信息相似度（COS）的过滤模型。大规模真实数据集上的实验表明，该模型不但可以有效解决物品相似度度量问题，而且相比传统方法，尤其是在物品特征非常稀疏的情况下，推荐准确性得到有效改进。     

基于高斯pLSA模型与项目的协同过滤混合推荐

协同过滤是推荐系统中常用的一种技术。以往的推荐算法往往只从用户或商品的角度单一地进行推荐,在推荐准确率上存在瓶颈和局限性。提出了一种新的混合推荐方法——结合基于高斯概率潜在语义分析模型与改进的基于项目的协同过滤算法,通过建立用户群体混合模型和基于目标项目的邻居集进行预测推荐。实验证明该算法与其他协同过滤算法相比具有更高的准确率。     

基于用户偏好和项目属性的协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤推荐算法是目前应用最为广泛的个性化推荐方法之一,但传统的推荐算法在计算目标用户邻居集时只考虑用户项目评分矩阵中的具体数值,没有考虑用户偏好以及用户评分与项目属性之间的关系,推荐精度也有待进一步提高。针对这一问题,提出了一种基于用户偏好和项目属性的协同过滤推荐算法(UPPPCF)。本算法在传统的用户项目评分矩阵基础上综合考虑用户偏好以及项目属性,把评分矩阵转变成基于用户偏好的用户项目属性评分矩阵,然后根据这一评分矩阵来计算目标用户的最近邻居集,克服了传统相似性计算方法只依靠用户评分值的不足,同时本文对预测值判定给出了一种有效的度量方法。在 MovieLen 数据集上的实验结果表明,本文提出的UPPPCF算法能够有效弥补传统协同过滤算法中的不足,而且在推荐精度上有了明显的提高。     

Distributed collaborative filtering with singular ratings for large scale recommendation

Collaborative filtering (CF) is an effective technique addressing the information overloading problem, where each user is associated with a set of rating scores on a set of items. For a chosen target user, conventional CF algorithms measure similarity between this user and other users by utilizing pairs of rating scores on common rated items, but discarding scores rated by one of them only. We call these comparative scores as dual ratings, while the non-comparative scores as singular ratings. Our experiments show that only about 10% ratings are dual ones that can be used for similarity evaluation, while the other 90% are singular ones. In this paper, we propose SingCF approach, which attempts to incorporate multiple singular ratings, in addition to dual ratings, to implement collaborative filtering, aiming at improving the recommendation accuracy. We first estimate the unrated scores for singular ratings and transform them into dual ones. Then we perform a CF process to discover neighborhood users and make predictions for each target user. Furthermore, we provide a MapReduce-based distributed framework on Hadoop for significant improvement in efficiency. Experiments in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the performance gains of our approaches.     

Fuzzy segmentation for object‐based image classification

This Letter proposes an object‐based image classification procedure which is based on fuzzy image‐regions instead of crisp image‐objects. The approach has three stages: (a) fuzzification in which fuzzy image‐regions are developed, resulting in a set of images whose digital values express the degree of membership of each pixel to target land‐cover classes; (b) feature analysis in which contextual properties of fuzzy image‐regions are quantified; and (c) defuzzification in which fuzzy image‐regions are allocated to target land‐cover classes. The proposed procedure is implemented using automated statistical techniques that require very little user interaction. The results indicate that fuzzy segmentation‐based methods produce acceptable thematic accuracy and could represent a viable alternative to current crisp image segmentation approaches.     

基于边界矩阵低阶近似和近邻模型的协同过滤算法

为解决矩阵分解应用到协同过滤算法的局限性和准确率等问题,提出基于边界矩阵低阶近似（BMA）和近邻模型的协同过滤算法（BMAN-CF）来提高物品评分预测的准确率。首先,引入BMA的矩阵分解算法,挖掘子矩阵的隐含特征信息,提高近邻集合查找的准确率;然后,根据传统基于用户和基于物品的协同过滤算法分别预测出目标用户对目标物品的评分,利用平衡因子和控制因子动态平衡两个预测结果,得到目标用户对物品的评分;最后,利用MapReduce计算框架的特点,对数据进行分块,将该算法在Hadoop环境下并行化。实验结果表明,BMAN-CF比其他矩阵分解算法有更高的评分预测准确率,且加速比实验验证了该算法具有较好的可扩展性。     

Modeling power and intermodulation behavior of microwave transistors with unified small‐signal/large‐signal neural network models

This article presents a detailed procedure to learn a nonlinear model and its derivatives to as many orders as desired with multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks. A modular neural network modeling a nonlinear function and its derivatives is introduced. The method has been used for the extraction of the large‐signal model of a power MESFET device, modeling the nonlinear relationship of drain‐source current I_ds as well as gate and drain charge Q_g and Q_d with respect to intrinsic voltages V_gs and V_ds over the whole operational bias region. The neural models have been implemented into a user‐defined nonlinear model of a commercial microwave simulator to predict output power performance as well as intermodulation distortion. The accuracy of the device model is verified by harmonic load‐pull measurements. This neural network approach has demonstrated to predict nonlinear behavior with enough accuracy even if based only on first‐order derivative information. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 13: 276–284, 2003.