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.     

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.     

GRIP: A Group Recommender Based on Interactive Preference Model

Numerous applications of recommender systems can provide us a tool to understand users. A group recommender reflects the analysis of multiple users’ behavior, and aims to provide each user of the group with the things they involve according to users’ preferences. Currently, most of the existing group recommenders ignore the interaction among the users. However, in the course of group activities, the interactive preferences will dramatically affect the success of recommenders. The problem becomes even more challenging when some unknown preferences of users are partly influenced by other users in the group. An interaction-based method named GRIP (Group Recommender Based on Interactive Preference) is presented which can use group activity history information and recommender post-rating feedback mechanism to generate interactive preference parameters. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, it is compared with traditional collaborative filtering on the MovieLens dataset. The results indicate the superiority of the GRIP recommender for multi-users regarding both validity and accuracy.     

Improving recommendations through an assumption-based multiagent approach: An application in the tourism domain

Recommender systems are popular tools dealing with the information overload problem in e-commerce web sites. The more they know about the users, the better recommendations they can provide. However, sometimes, in real situations, it is necessary to make guesses about the value of missing but useful data in order to generate a recommendation immediately, rather than waiting the data becomes available. This paper presents an assumption-based multiagent recommender system capable of making these types of assumptions about the preferences of the users. The approach was validate in the tourism domain (recommendation of travel packages). Experiments were conducted to illustrate the impact of various assumption making strategies on the quality of the recommendations as well as the impact of trust assignment.     

Collaborative user modeling for enhanced content filtering in recommender systems

Recommender systems, which have emerged in response to the problem of information overload, provide users with recommendations of content suited to their needs. To provide proper recommendations to users, personalized recommender systems require accurate user models of characteristics, preferences and needs. In this study, we propose a collaborative approach to user modeling for enhancing personalized recommendations to users. Our approach first discovers useful and meaningful user patterns, and then enriches the personal model with collaboration from other similar users. In order to evaluate the performance of our approach, we compare experimental results with those of a probabilistic learning model, a user model based on collaborative filtering approaches, and a vector space model. We present experimental results that show how our model performs better than existing alternatives.     

A Deep Learning Based Approach for Context-Aware Multi-Criteria Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are similar to an information filtering system that helps identify items that best satisfy the users’ demands based on their preference profiles. Context-aware recommender systems (CARSs) and multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRSs) are extensions of traditional recommender systems. CARSs have integrated additional contextual information such as time, place, and so on for providing better recommendations. However, the majority of CARSs use ratings as a unique criterion for building communities. Meanwhile, MCRSs utilize user preferences in multiple criteria to better generate recommendations. Up to now, how to exploit context in MCRSs is still an open issue. This paper proposes a novel approach, which relies on deep learning for context-aware multi-criteria recommender systems. We apply deep neural network (DNN) models to predict the context-aware multi-criteria ratings and learn the aggregation function. We conduct experiments to evaluate the effect of this approach on the real-world dataset. A significant result is that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for recommendation effectiveness.     

Recommender Systems Research: A Connection-Centric Survey

Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. While research in recommender systems grew out of information retrieval and filtering, the topic has steadily advanced into a legitimate and challenging research area of its own. Recommender systems have traditionally been studied from a content-based filtering vs. collaborative design perspective. Recommendations, however, are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users and social context. Therefore, ultimately all recommender systems make connections among people and thus should be surveyed from such a perspective. This viewpoint is under-emphasized in the recommender systems literature. We therefore take a connection-oriented perspective toward recommender systems research. We posit that recommendation has an inherently social element and is ultimately intended to connect people either directly as a result of explicit user modeling or indirectly through the discovery of relationships implicit in extant data. Thus, recommender systems are characterized by how they model users to bring people together: explicitly or implicitly. Finally, user modeling and the connection-centric viewpoint raise broadening and social issues—such as evaluation, targeting, and privacy and trust—which we also briefly address.     

Constructing a Hybrid Recommender System

Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences International - Recommender systems provide recommendations for users. In this paper, we train and test some algorithms for recommender systems on a certain...     

An overview of recommender systems in the healthy food domain

Recently, food recommender systems have received increasing attention due to their relevance for healthy living. Most existing studies on the food domain focus on recommendations that suggest proper food items for individual users on the basis of considering their preferences or health problems. These systems also provide functionalities to keep track of nutritional consumption as well as to persuade users to change their eating behavior in positive ways. Also, group recommendation functionalities are very useful in the food domain, especially when a group of users wants to have a dinner together at home or have a birthday party in a restaurant. Such scenarios create many challenges for food recommender systems since the preferences of all group members have to be taken into account in an adequate fashion. In this paper, we present an overview of recommendation techniques for individuals and groups in the healthy food domain. In addition, we analyze the existing state-of-the-art in food recommender systems and discuss research challenges related to the development of future food recommendation technologies.     

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.      

Informed Recommender: Basing Recommendations on Consumer Product Reviews

Recommender systems attempt to predict items in which a user might be interested, given some information about the user's and items' profiles. Most existing recommender systems use content-based or collaborative filtering methods or hybrid methods that combine both techniques (see the sidebar for more details). We created Informed Recommender to address the problem of using consumer opinion about products, expressed online in free-form text, to generate product recommendations. Informed recommender uses prioritized consumer product reviews to make recommendations. Using text-mining techniques, it maps each piece of each review comment automatically into an ontology.     

一种基于Sigmoid函数的改进协同过滤推荐算法

随着电子商务和社交网络的蓬勃发展, 推荐系统逐渐成为数据挖掘领域的重要研究方向。推荐系统能够从海量信息中定位用户兴趣点, 提供个性化服务。协同过滤算法能够有效分析用户偏好, 提供合适的推荐服务。针对评分矩阵稀疏时传统协同过滤算法性能很差的问题, 提出一种基于Sigmoid函数的改进推荐系统算法。利用Sigmoid函数对不同项目进行建模, 得到项目的平均受欢迎程度; 利用Sigmoid函数对不同用户进行建模, 将评分映射为用户对项目的喜好程度; 根据用户对项目喜好程度应该与项目平均受欢迎程度贴近的原则进行评分预测。在两组真实数据集合上的实验结果表明, 该算法较好地解决了数据稀疏性问题, 能够有效提高传统算法的预测准确性。     

Progress in context-aware recommender systems — An overview

Recommender Systems are the set of tools and techniques to provide useful recommendations and suggestions to the users to help them in the decision-making process for choosing the right products or services. The recommender systems tailored to leverage contextual information (such as location, time, companion or such) in the recommendation process are called context-aware recommender systems. This paper presents a review on the continual development of context-aware recommender systems by analyzing different kinds of contexts without limiting to any specific application domain. First, an in-depth analysis is conducted on different recommendation algorithms used in context-aware recommender systems. Then this information is used to find out that how these techniques deals with the curse of dimensionality, which is an inherent issue in such systems. Since contexts are primarily based on users’ activity patterns that leads to the development of personalized recommendation services for the users. Thus, this paper also presents a review on how this contextual information is represented (either explicitly or implicitly) in the recommendation process. We also presented a list of datasets and evaluation metrics used in the setting of CARS. We tried to highlight that how algorithmic approaches used in CARS differ from those of conventional RS. In that, we presented what modification or additions are being applied on the top of conventional recommendation approaches to produce context-aware recommendations. Finally, the outstanding challenges and research opportunities are presented in front of the research community for analysis     

Evolutionary learning approach to multi-agent negotiation for group recommender systems

Recommender systems (RSs) have emerged as a solution to the information overload problem by filtering and presenting the users with information, services etc. according to their preferences. RSs research has focused on algorithms for recommending items for individual users. However, in certain domains, it may be desirable to be able to recommend items for a group of persons, e.g., movies, restaurants, etc. for which some remarkable group recommender systems (GRSs) have been developed. GRSs provide recommendations to groups, i.e., they take all individual group members’ preferences into account and satisfy them optimally with a sequence of items. Taking into consideration the fact that each group member has different behaviour with respect to other members in the group, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based multi-agent negotiation scheme for GRS (GA-MANS-GRS) where each agent acts on behalf of one group member. The GA-MANS-GRS is modelled as many one-to-one bilateral negotiation schemes with two phases. In the negotiation phase, we have applied GA to obtain the maximum utility offer for each user and generated the most appropriate ranking for each individual in the group. For the recommendation generation phase, again GA is employed to produce the list of ratings with that minimizes the sum of distances among the preferences of the group members. Finally, the results of computational experiments are presented that establish the superiority of our proposed model over baseline GRSs techniques.

     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Recommender Systems

This special issue presents eight articles, five long and three short, on techniques to improve recommender systems. They cover improving such aspects as user interaction with recommenders, the quality of results presented to users, and user trust in presented recommendations. This article is part of a special issue on Recommender Systems.     

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.     

Preference dynamics with multimodal user-item interactions in social media recommendation

Recommender systems elicit the interests and preferences of individuals and make recommendations accordingly, a main challenge for expert and intelligent systems. An essential problem in recommender systems is to learn users’ preference dynamics, that is, the constant evolution of the explicit or the implicit information, which is diversified throughout time according to the user actions. Also, in real settings data sparsity degrades the recommendation accuracy. Hence, state-of-the-art methods exploit multimodal information of users-item interactions to reduce sparsity, but they ignore preference dynamics and do not capture users’ most recent preferences. In this article, we present a Temporal Collective Matrix Factorization (TCMF) model, making the following contributions: (i) we capture preference dynamics through a joint decomposition model that extracts the user temporal patterns, and (ii) co-factorize the temporal patterns with multimodal user-item interactions by minimizing a joint objective function to generate the recommendations. We evaluate the performance of TCMF in terms of accuracy and root mean square error, and show that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art strategies.     

Blockchain-based recommender systems: Applications,challenges and future opportunities

Recommender systems have been widely used in different application domains including energy-preservation, e-commerce, healthcare, social media, etc. Such applications require the analysis and mining of massive amounts of various types of user data, including demographics, preferences, social interactions, etc. in order to develop accurate and precise recommender systems. Such datasets often include sensitive information, yet most recommender systems are focusing on the models’ accuracy and ignore issues related to security and the users’ privacy. Despite the efforts to overcome these problems using different risk reduction techniques, none of them has been completely successful in ensuring cryptographic security and protection of the users’ private information. To bridge this gap, the blockchain technology is presented as a promising strategy to promote security and privacy preservation in recommender systems, not only because of its security and privacy salient features, but also due to its resilience, adaptability, fault tolerance and trust characteristics. This paper presents a holistic review of blockchain-based recommender systems covering challenges, open issues and solutions. Accordingly, a well-designed taxonomy is introduced to describe the security and privacy challenges, overview existing frameworks and discuss their applications and benefits when using blockchain before indicating opportunities for future research.     

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.