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。     

Learning bidirectional asymmetric similarity for collaborative filtering via matrix factorization

Memory-based collaborative filtering (CF) aims at predicting the rating of a certain item for a particular user based on the previous ratings from similar users and/or similar items. Previous studies in finding similar users and items have several drawbacks. First, they are based on user-defined similarity measurements, such as Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) or Vector Space Similarity (VSS), which are, for the most part, not adaptive and optimized for specific applications and data. Second, these similarity measures are restricted to symmetric ones such that the similarity between A and B is the same as that for B and A, although symmetry may not always hold in many real world applications. Third, they typically treat the similarity functions between users and functions between items separately. However, in reality, the similarities between users and between items are inter-related. In this paper, we propose a novel unified model for users and items, known as Similarity Learning based Collaborative Filtering (SLCF) , based on a novel adaptive bidirectional asymmetric similarity measurement. Our proposed model automatically learns asymmetric similarities between users and items at the same time through matrix factorization. Theoretical analysis shows that our model is a novel generalization of singular value decomposition (SVD). We show that, once the similarity relation is learned, it can be used flexibly in many ways for rating prediction. To take full advantage of the model, we propose several strategies to make the best use of the proposed similarity function for rating prediction. The similarity can be used either to improve the memory-based approaches or directly in a model based CF approaches. In addition, we also propose an online version of the rating prediction method to incorporate new users and new items. We evaluate SLCF using three benchmark datasets, including MovieLens, EachMovie and Netflix, through which we show that our methods can outperform many state-of-the-art baselines.     

基于时序逆影响的随机游走推荐算法*

相似性计算是协同过滤推荐的关键步骤,针对传统相似性计算认为相似关系是对等的且没有考虑消费顺序和时间间隔的问题,提出了基于时序逆影响的随机游走推荐算法。首先,基于用户时序关联图提出一种新的称为时序逆影响的相似性度量,利用随机游走得到了目标用户近邻集合;其次,利用随机游走在项目时序关联图上进一步改进推荐的多样性和覆盖率。它不但认为用户间相似是不对称的,考虑了用户消费项目的顺序和时间间隔,获得了用户全局的直接和间接近邻,而且考虑了项目间的时序逆影响。通过在真实数据集上的大量试验结果表明,与其他随机游走方法相比,不但能提高推荐性能、缓解数据稀疏,而且通过提高多样性和覆盖率解决了过拟合的问题。     

CluCF: a clustering CF algorithm to address data sparsity problem

In QoS-based Web service recommendation, predicting Quality of Service (QoS) for users will greatly aid service selection and discovery. Collaborative filtering (CF) is an effective method for Web service selection and recommendation. Data sparsity is an important challenges for CF algorithms. Although model-based algorithms can address the data sparsity problem, those models are often time-consuming to build and update. Thus, these CF algorithms aren’t fit for highly dynamic and large-scale environments, such as Web service recommendation systems. In order to overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a novel approach CluCF, which employs user clusters and service clusters to address the data sparsity problem and classifies the new user (the new service) by location factor to lower the time complexity of updating clusters. Additionally, in order to improve the prediction accuracy, CluCF employs time factor. Time-aware user-service matrix Mu;s(tk, d) is introduced, and the time-aware similarity measurement and time-aware QoS prediction are employed in this paper. Since the QoS performance of Web services is highly related to invocation time due to some time-varying factors (e.g., service status, network condition), time-aware similarity measurement and time-aware QoS prediction are more trustworthy than traditional similarity measurement and QoS prediction, respectively. Since similarity measurement and QoS prediction are two key steps of neighborhood-based CF, time-aware CF will be more accurate than traditional CF. Moreover, our approach systematically combines user-based and item-based methods and employs influence weights to balance these two predicted values, automatically. To validate our algorithm, this paper conducts a series of large-scale experiments based on a real-world Web service QoS dataset. Experimental results show that our approach is capable of alleviating the data sparsity problem.     

一种有效缓解数据稀疏性的混合协同过滤算法

目前协同过滤技术已经被成功运用到各种推荐系统中,但是随着资源种类的不断膨胀与用户日益的增加,用来评判的数据矩阵越来越稀疏,严重影响了推荐质量。为此设计了一种混合新算法,对基于项目的协同过滤算法提出两个改进方法：首先根据网站的层次结构信息改进了传统的相似度计算方法;其次增加了预测缺失兴趣值的算法,使用户的交叉兴趣点增多,有效缓解了稀疏性的问题。实验结果证明了新算法具有较高的推荐精度,能够找到用户潜在的兴趣页面。     

集成社会化标签和用户背景信息的协同过滤推荐方法

针对传统的协同推荐算法存在数据稀疏和推荐精度低的问题,提出了一种集成社会化标签和用户背景信息的协同过滤(CF)推荐方法。首先,分别计算基于社会化标签和用户背景信息的用户间的相似度;然后,基于用户评分计算用户间的相似度;最后,集成上述3种相似性度量产生用户间综合相似度,并对目标用户进行项目推荐。实验结果表明,与传统的协同过滤推荐算法相比,所提方法在正常数据集和冷启动数据集下的平均绝对误差(MAE)平均降低了16%和22.6%。该方法不仅能有效地提高推荐算法的精度,而且能较好地解决数据稀疏和冷启动的问题。     

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.     

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.     

基于信任和项目偏好的协调过滤算法

针对传统协同过滤算法不能深度挖掘用户关系,以及无法对新项目进行用户推荐的问题,提出了基于信任和用户偏好的协同过滤（TIPCF）算法。首先,通过分析用户评分判断用户的可信度并量化用户间的信任程度,挖掘用户潜在的信任关系;其次,考虑到用户之间对于不同目标项目偏好程度的差异会对用户相似性产生影响,在传统用户相似性算法上添加用户偏好度改进相似性算法;然后,通过结合用户信任度和改进的相似度,使得最近邻的选取更加准确;最后,根据用户对项目属性的偏好对新项目进行推荐。Movielens数据集实验结果表明,与传统的协同过滤算法相比,TIPCF算法的平均绝对误差减少了6.7%;在推荐新项目时,TIPCF算法的平均绝对误差减少了10.7%。TIPCF算法不仅提高了推荐的准确度,而且增加了新项目的推荐概率。     

融合争议度特征的协同过滤推荐算法

基于项目的协同过滤推荐算法在电子商务中有着广泛的引用,该算法的核心是计算项目之间的相似度.传统的计算项目相似度算法仅仅通过项目间共同用户评分值差异来计算,在数据稀疏情况下,项目间共同用户评分值很少,导致此类算法性能严重下降.针对此问题,从项目间的整体评分角度出发,提出争议相似度的概念,争议相似度从项目间评分方差差异的角度衡量项目间相似性.将争议度特征融合到基于项目之间共同用户评分的传统相似度算法中,进而提出了融合项目争议度特征的协同过滤推荐算法,最终缓解了传统算法在稀疏数据情况下相似度计算不准确的问题.实验结果表明该算法在数据稀疏环境下可以明显提升推荐质量.     

A new method to find neighbor users that improves the performance of Collaborative Filtering

Recommender Systems (RS) are used to help people reduce the amount of time they spend to find the items they are looking for. One of the most successful techniques used in RS is called Collaborative Filtering (CF). It looks into the choices made by other users to find items that are most similar to the target user. Data sparsity and high dimensionality which are common in the RS domains have negatively affected the efficiency of CF. The current paper seeks to solve the mentioned problems through a neighbor user finding method which has been derived from the subspace clustering approach. In this method, the authors extract different subspaces of rated items under the categories of Interested, Neither Interested Nor Uninterested, and Uninterested. Based on subspaces, tree structures of neighbor users are drawn for the target user. Furthermore, a new similarity method is proposed to compute the similarity value. This new method has been tested via the Movielens 100K, Movielens 1M and Jester datasets in order to make a comparison with the traditional techniques. The results have indicated that the proposed method can enhance the performance of the Recommender Systems.     

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。     

一种新的社会化相似度计算方法

基于社交网络的推荐算法引入社交网络信息到协同过滤算法中来, 使得用户朋友的偏好能够影响用户本身的偏好 。这些算法需要用到用户之间的相似度信息。目前有两个流行的基于共同评分项目集的相似度计算函数（VSS、PCC）。在很多情况下, 由于用户间没有共同评分项目集, 故无法计算他们之间的相似度。为了解决这个问题, 提出了一种基于矩阵分解的新的社会化相似度计算方法。在真实的包含社交网络的数据集上进行实验验证, 该方法的性能优于几个经典的基于社交网络的协同过滤算法, 而且能够解决新用户的冷启动问题。     

一种改进的协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤推荐算法是电子商务推荐系统中应用最成功的推荐技术之一,而影响协同过滤推荐算法准确率的关键因素是用户相似性度量方法。针对传统相似性度量方法没有考虑共同评分项数量对推荐质量的影响,将用户之间的共同评分项数量作为相似性计算的一个重要指标,从而得到一种改进的相似性度量方法。但这仍然不能解决数据稀疏带来的推荐质量下降的问题,鉴于此,在上述改进的基础上,提出了利用复杂网络中的结构相似性来度量用户之间相似性的方法,使计算结果更具实际意义和准确性。实验表明,通过这些改进能够有效避免传统方法带来的弊端,提高系统的推荐质量。     

基于度量学习的多空间推荐系统

隐式反馈具有数据获取成本小、形式广泛的特点,因此在现代推荐系统中被广泛使用.由于用户的隐式反馈通常是稀疏,不平衡,且含义不明确的.因此,想要准确学习用户和物品之间的复杂交互具有挑战性.传统的基于矩阵分解的推荐方法只能建模用户-物品之间的相似性.同时,矩阵分解使用点积运算作为相似度评估方式,而点积运算不满足三角不等式,即不能将用户-物品相似性传递到用户-用户以及物品-物品的相似性建模.因此,矩阵分解不足以在隐式反馈中充分建模用户和物品的关系.尽管现在有基于隐式反馈使用欧式距离来度量用户-物品相似度的度量学习方法,使得对应的推荐方法能够满足三角不等式.但是,现有的度量方法通常会将每个用户或者物品表示为度量空间中的单个点,进而在单个空间内通过用户-物品之间的距离来表征用户-物品之间的相似性.由于在不同的环境下,用户对于同一种类型的物品的偏好也可能存在差异.基于单个空间的用户、物品嵌入向量有可能无法满足用户具有的多种偏好和物品具有的多种属性,进而限制了推荐系统的性能.为了充分刻画用户和物品,我们尝试从多个侧面对于用户和物品进行表示,并提出了一个基于多空间的度量学习(MML)框架.通过设计整合多个空间相似性的度量方式,我们将用户和物品投影到多个空间中进行细粒度的表示.另外,我们设计了一种经过校准的优化策略,包括经过校准的最大间隔损失函数和经过校准的采样方法.在保持多空间度量学习表示能力的同时,确保框架的有效性.最后,模型通过训练好的用户、物品向量,对于稀疏的用户-物品交互矩阵进行填补.在动态更新空间权重的同时,可以赋予模型新的训练视角,最终实现端到端的训练.通过四个真实世界推荐数据集上进行的大量实验表明,MML可以在Recall和nDCG衡量指标上将目前最优的对比算法提高40%以上.     

协同过滤中基于用户兴趣度的相似性度量方法

在个性化推荐算法中,相似性计算方法是决定算法推荐效率的关键。通过分析传统的相似性度量方法在推荐系统中存在的不足,提出了一种基于用户兴趣度的相似性计算方法。该方法利用用户对不同项目类别的兴趣程度与用户评分相结合进行用户之间的相似性计算,克服了传统相似性计算方法仅仅依据用户评分进行相似性计算的不足,并在一定程度上减少了评价数据稀疏的负面影响。实验结果表明,该方法可以有效地克服传统相似性方法中存在的不足,使推荐系统的推荐质量有明显提高。     

Collaborative filtering and deep learning based recommendation system for cold start items

Recommender system is a specific type of intelligent systems, which exploits historical user ratings on items and/or auxiliary information to make recommendations on items to the users. It plays a critical role in a wide range of online shopping, e-commercial services and social networking applications. Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most popular approaches used for recommender systems, but it suffers from complete cold start (CCS) problem where no rating record are available and incomplete cold start (ICS) problem where only a small number of rating records are available for some new items or users in the system. In this paper, we propose two recommendation models to solve the CCS and ICS problems for new items, which are based on a framework of tightly coupled CF approach and deep learning neural network. A specific deep neural network SADE is used to extract the content features of the items. The state of the art CF model, timeSVD++, which models and utilizes temporal dynamics of user preferences and item features, is modified to take the content features into prediction of ratings for cold start items. Extensive experiments on a large Netflix rating dataset of movies are performed, which show that our proposed recommendation models largely outperform the baseline models for rating prediction of cold start items. The two proposed recommendation models are also evaluated and compared on ICS items, and a flexible scheme of model retraining and switching is proposed to deal with the transition of items from cold start to non-cold start status. The experiment results on Netflix movie recommendation show the tight coupling of CF approach and deep learning neural network is feasible and very effective for cold start item recommendation. The design is general and can be applied to many other recommender systems for online shopping and social networking applications. The solution of cold start item problem can largely improve user experience and trust of recommender systems, and effectively promote cold start items.     

基于最近邻用户动态重排序的协同过滤方法

在传统协同推荐方法中,相似性的度量是整个方法的核心.在数据稀疏情况下,现有相似度计算方法仅使用历史评分数据,难以准确反映用户之间的相似程度;相关改进方法在考虑用户共同评分数量对相似度的影响时,引入的重叠度参数需要手动调整,限制了方法实用性.针对上述问题,本文提出一种基于最近邻用户重排序(DRNN)的相似度方法,充分利用项目类别信息,根据不同的目标项目动态调整邻居集内用户权重,能更准确地刻画用户之间的相似性;并提出修正的重叠度因子弥补现有方法中手动调整参数的不足,增强了方法实用性.实验结果表明,该方法可以明显提升预测结果的准确性.     

Variable selection for collaborative filtering with market basket data

The market basket data in the form of a binary user–item matrix or a binary item–user matrix can be modeled as a binary classification problem, which actually tackles collaborative filtering (CF) as well as target marketing. Effective variable selection (VS) can increase the prediction accuracy as well as identify important users or items in CF as well as target marketing. Therefore, we propose two new VS approaches: a Pearson correlation‐based approach and a forward random forests regression‐based approach, comparing the performance in a variety of experimental settings. The experimental results show that the proposed VS approaches outperform the conventional approaches in the examples. Furthermore, the experimental results are more reasonable and informative than the previous experimental results because the binary misclassification error and Top‐N accuracy for the user CF, the item CF, the user modeling, and the item modeling are all considered in this paper.     

Diversified recommendation method combining topic model and random walk

As one of the most widely used algorithms in recommendation field, collaborative filtering (CF) predicts the unknown rating of items based on similar neighbors. Although many CF-based recommendation methods have been proposed, there still be room for improvement. Firstly, the data sparsity problem still remains a big challenge for CF algorithms to find similar neighbors. Secondly, there are many redundant similar items in the recommendation list generated by traditional CF algorithms, which cannot meet the user wide interest. Therefore, we propose a diversified recommendation method combining topic model and random walk. A weighted random walk model is presented to find all direct and indirect similar neighbors on the sparse data, improving the accuracy of rating prediction. By taking both users’ behavior data and items’ lags into account, we give a diversity measurement method based on the topic distribution of items discovered by Linked-LDA model. Furthermore, a diversified ranking algorithm is developed to balance the accuracy and diversity of recommendation results. We compare our method with six other recommendation methods on a real-world dataset. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the other methods and achieves the best personalized recommendation effect.