Entertainment recommender systems for group of users

Recommender systems are used to recommend potentially interesting items to users in different domains. Nowadays, there is a wide range of domains in which there is a need to offer recommendations to group of users instead of individual users. As a consequence, there is also a need to address the preferences of individual members of a group of users so as to provide suggestions for groups as a whole. Group recommender systems present a whole set of new challenges within the field of recommender systems. In this article, we present two expert recommender systems that suggest entertainment to groups of users. These systems, jMusicGroupRecommender and jMoviesGroupRecommender, suggest music and movies and utilize different methods for the generation of group recommendations: merging recommendations made for individuals, aggregation of individuals’ ratings, and construction of group preference models. We also describe the results obtained when comparing different group recommendation techniques in both domains.     

Collaborative error-reflected models for cold-start recommender systems

Collaborative Filtering (CF), one of the most successful technologies among recommender systems, is a system assisting users to easily find useful information. One notable challenge in practical CF is the cold start problem, which can be divided into cold start items and cold start users. Traditional CF systems are typically unable to make good quality recommendations in the situation where users and items have few opinions. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a unique method of building models derived from explicit ratings and we apply the models to CF recommender systems. The proposed method first predicts actual ratings and subsequently identifies prediction errors for each user. From this error information, pre-computed models, collectively called the error-reflected model, are built. We then apply the models to new predictions. Experimental results show that our approach obtains significant improvement in dealing with cold start problems, compared to existing work.     

Developing recommender systems with the consideration of product profitability for sellers

In electronic commerce web sites, recommender systems are popularly being employed to help customers in selecting suitable products to meet their personal needs. These systems learn about user preferences over time and automatically suggest products that fit the learned model of user preferences. Traditionally, recommendations are provided to customers depending on purchase probability and customers’ preferences, without considering the profitability factor for sellers. This study attempts to integrate the profitability factor into the traditional recommender systems. Based on this consideration, we propose two profitability-based recommender systems called CPPRS (Convenience plus Profitability Perspective Recommender System) and HPRS (Hybrid Perspective Recommender System). Moreover, comparisons between our proposed systems (considering both purchase probability and profitability) and traditional systems (emphasizing an individual’s preference) are made to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of these systems in terms of recommendation accuracy and/or profit from cross-selling. The experimental results show that the proposed HPRS can increase profit from cross-selling without losing recommendation accuracy.     

VCR: Virtual community recommender using the technology acceptance model and the user’s needs type

A recommender system is a kind of automated and sophisticated decision support system that is needed to provide a personalized solution in a brief form without going through a complicated search process. There have been a substantial number of studies to make recommender systems more accurate and efficient, however, most of them have a common critical limitation – these systems are used as virtual salespeople, rather than as marketing tools. A crucial reason for this phenomenon is that the models suggested by prior studies only focus on a user’s behavioral outcomes without consideration of the embedded procedure. In this study, we propose a novel recommender system based on user’s behavioral model. Our proposed system, labeled VCR—virtual community recommender, recommends optimal virtual communities for an active user by case-based reasoning (CBR) using behavioral factors suggested in the technology acceptance model (TAM) and its extended models. In addition, it refines its recommendation results by considering the user’s needs type at the point of usage. To test the usefulness of our recommendation model, we conducted two-step validation–empirical validation for the collected data set, and practical validation to investigate the actual satisfaction level of users. Experimental results showed that our model outperformed all comparative models from the perspective of user satisfaction.     

融合信任关系和有用性评价的矩阵分解推荐方法

冷启动和数据稀疏性问题是推荐系统面临的两大难题。现有的大多数基于矩阵分解的推荐方法将用户孤立对待,忽略了用户之间的信任关系,导致推荐性能较低。提出一种融合信任关系和有用性评价的矩阵分解推荐方法。该方法在对评分矩阵进行概率分解的基础上,加入有用性评价和用户信任关系,采用交替最小二乘法训练模型参数。Epinions和Ciao数据集上的对比实验表明,所提方法有效提高了推荐系统的准确性和可靠性,尤其存在冷启动用户时,该方法的推荐精度明显优于传统的推荐方法。     

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].

     

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.     

Product recommendation with temporal dynamics

In many E-commerce recommender systems, a special class of recommendation involves recommending items to users in a life cycle. For example, customers who have babies will shop on Diapers.com within a relatively long period, and purchase different products for babies within different growth stages. Traditional recommendation algorithms produce recommendation lists similar to items that the target user has accessed before (content filtering), or compute recommendation by analyzing the items purchased by the users who are similar to the target user (collaborative filtering). Such recommendation paradigms cannot effectively resolve the situation with a life cycle, i.e., the need of customers within different stages might vary significantly. In this paper, we model users’ behavior with life cycles by employing hand-crafted item taxonomies, of which the background knowledge can be tailored for the computation of personalized recommendation. In particular, our method first formalizes a user’s long-term behavior using the item taxonomy, and then identifies the exact stage of the user. By incorporating collaborative filtering into recommendation, we can easily provide a personalized item list to the user through other similar users within the same stage. An empirical evaluation conducted on a purchasing data collection obtained from Diapers.com demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed method.     

Deep collaborative filtering with social promoter score-based user-item interaction: a new perspective in recommendation

Most of the existing recommender systems understand the preference level of users based on user-item interaction ratings. Rating-based recommendation systems mostly ignore negative users/reviewers (who give poor ratings). There are two types of negative users. Some negative users give negative or poor ratings randomly, and some negative users give ratings according to the quality of items. Some negative users, who give ratings according to the quality of items, are known as reliable negative users, and they are crucial for a better recommendation. Similar characteristics are also applicable to positive users. From a poor reflection of a user to a specific item, the existing recommender systems presume that this item is not in the user’s preferred category. That may not always be correct. We should investigate whether the item is not in the user’s preferred category, whether the user is dissatisfied with the quality of a favorite item or whether the user gives ratings randomly/casually. To overcome this problem, we propose a Social Promoter Score (SPS)-based recommendation. We construct two user-item interaction matrices with users’ explicit SPS value and users’ view activities as implicit feedback. With these matrices as inputs, our attention layer-based deep neural model deepCF_SPS learns a common low-dimensional space to present the features of users and items and understands the way users rate items. Extensive experiments on online review datasets present that our method can be remarkably futuristic compared to some popular baselines. The empirical evidence from the experimental results shows that our model is the best in terms of scalability and runtime over the baselines.

     

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.     

Managing uncertainty in group recommending processes

While the problem of building recommender systems has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most recommender systems are designed for recommending items to individuals. The aim of this paper is to automatically recommend a ranked list of new items to a group of users. We will investigate the value of using Bayesian networks to represent the different uncertainties involved in a group recommending process, i.e. those uncertainties related to mechanisms that govern the interactions between group members and the processes leading to the final choice or recommendation. We will also show how the most common aggregation strategies might be encoded using a Bayesian network formalism. The proposed model can be considered as a collaborative Bayesian network-based group recommender system, where group ratings are computed from the past voting patterns of other users with similar tastes.

面向用户偏好建模的个性化对话推荐算法

推荐系统的目标是从物品数据库中，选择出与用户兴趣偏好相匹配的子集，缓解用户面临的“信息过载”问题。因而近年来推荐系统越来越多地应用到电商、社交等领域，展现出巨大的商业潜力。传统推荐系统中，系统对用户的认知往往来源于历史交互记录，例如点击率或者购买记录，这是一种隐式用户反馈。对话推荐系统能够通过自然语言与用户进行多轮对话，逐步深入挖掘其兴趣偏好，从而向对方提供高质量的推荐结果。相比于传统推荐系统，对话推荐系统主要有两方面的不同。其一，对话推荐系统能够利用自然语言与用户进行语义上连贯的多轮对话，提升了人机交互中的用户体验；其二，系统能够询问特定的问题直接获取用户的显式反馈，从而更深入地理解用户兴趣偏好，提供更可靠的推荐结果。目前已经有不少工作在不同的问题设定下对该领域进行了探索，然而尽管如此，这些工作仍仅局限于关注当前正在进行的对话，忽视了过去交互记录中蕴涵的丰富信息，导致对用户偏好建模的不充分。为了解决这个问题，本文提出了一个面向用户偏好建模的个性化对话推荐算法框架，通过双线性模型注意力机制与自注意力层次化编码结构进行用户偏好建模，从而完成对候选物品的排序与推荐。本文设计的模型结构能够在充分利用用户历史对话信息的同时，权衡历史对话与当前对话两类数据的重要性。丰富的用户相关信息来源使得推荐结果在契合用户个性化偏好的同时，更具备多样性，从而缓解“信息茧房”等现象带来的不良影响。基于公开数据集的实验表明了本文方法在个性化对话推荐任务上的有效性。     

A strategy-oriented operation module for recommender systems in E-commerce

Electronic commerce (EC) has become an important support for business and is regarded as an efficient system that connects suppliers with online users. Among the applications of EC, a recommender system (RS) is undoubtedly a popular issue to make the best recommendation to the users. Even if many approaches have been proposed to perfect the recommendation, a comprehensive module comprising of essential sub-modules of input profiles, a recommendation scheme, and an output interface of recommendations in the RS is still lacking. Besides, the fundamental issue of profit consideration for an EC company is not stressed in general terms. Therefore, this study aims to construct an RS with a strategy-oriented operation module regarding the above aspects; and with this module, an approach named clique-effects collaborative filtering (CECF) for predicting the consumer's purchase behavior was proposed. Finally, we applied our proposed module to a 3C retailer in Taiwan, and promising results were obtained.

Scope and Purpose

This study aims to construct a comprehensive module for the recommender systems. The proposed strategy-oriented operation module comprises the essential parts of a recommender system. By utilizing the proposed module with marketing strategies and an effective on-line interface scheme, the recommender system could emphasize not only the customer's satisfaction as conventional recommender system suggested, but also the supplier's profit which shall be an important issue to an E-commerce company. Thus, a better recommendation environment could be displayed.     

基于属性优化矩阵补全的抗托攻击推荐算法

托攻击是当前推荐系统面临的严峻挑战之一。由于推荐系统的开放性,恶意用户可轻易对其注入精心设计的评分从而影响推荐结果,降低用户体验。基于属性优化结构化噪声矩阵补全技术,提出一种鲁棒的抗托攻击个性化推荐（SATPR）算法,将攻击评分视为评分矩阵中的结构化行噪声并采用L2,1范数进行噪声建模,同时引入用户与物品的属性特征以提高托攻击检测精度。实验表明,SATPR算法在托攻击下可取得比传统推荐算法更精确的个性化评分预测效果。     

A time-based approach to effective recommender systems using implicit feedback

Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations on products or services to customers. Collaborative filtering is a widely used method of providing recommendations using explicit ratings on items from users. In some e-commerce environments, however, it is difficult to collect explicit feedback data; only implicit feedback is available.

In this paper, we present a method of building an effective collaborative filtering-based recommender system for an e-commerce environment without explicit feedback data. Our method constructs pseudo rating data from the implicit feedback data. When building the pseudo rating matrix, we incorporate temporal information such as the user’s purchase time and the item’s launch time in order to increase recommendation accuracy.

Based on this method, we built both user-based and item-based collaborative filtering-based recommender systems for character images (wallpaper) in a mobile e-commerce environment and conducted a variety of experiments. Empirical results show our time-incorporated recommender system is significantly more accurate than a pure collaborative filtering system.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Trust-inspiring explanation interfaces for recommender systems

A recommender system’s ability to establish trust with users and convince them of its recommendations, such as which camera or PC to purchase, is a crucial design factor especially for e-commerce environments. This observation led us to build a trust model for recommender agents with a focus on the agent’s trustworthiness as derived from the user’s perception of its competence and especially its ability to explain the recommended results. We present in this article new results of our work in developing design principles and algorithms for constructing explanation interfaces. We show the effectiveness of these principles via a significant-scale user study in which we compared an interface developed based on these principles with a traditional one. The new interface, called the organization interface where results are grouped according to their tradeoff properties, is shown to be significantly more effective in building user trust than the traditional approach. Users perceive it more capable and efficient in assisting them to make decisions, and they are more likely to return to the interface. We therefore recommend designers to build trust-inspiring interfaces due to their high likelihood to increase users’ intention to save cognitive effort and the intention to return to the recommender system.     

Shilling attack detection utilizing semi-supervised learning method for collaborative recommender system

Collaborative filtering (CF) technique is capable of generating personalized recommendations. However, the recommender systems utilizing CF as their key algorithms are vulnerable to shilling attacks which insert malicious user profiles into the systems to push or nuke the reputations of targeted items. There are only a small number of labeled users in most of the practical recommender systems, while a large number of users are unlabeled because it is expensive to obtain their identities. In this paper, Semi-SAD, a new semi-supervised learning based shilling attack detection algorithm is proposed to take advantage of both types of data. It first trains a naïve Bayes classifier on a small set of labeled users, and then incorporates unlabeled users with EM-λ to improve the initial naïve Bayes classifier. Experiments on MovieLens datasets are implemented to compare the efficiency of Semi-SAD with supervised learning based detector and unsupervised learning based detector. The results indicate that Semi-SAD can better detect various kinds of shilling attacks than others, especially against obfuscated and hybrid shilling attacks.