Enriching one-class collaborative filtering with content information from social media

In recent years, recommender systems have become popular to handle the information overload problem of social media websites. The most widely used Collaborative Filtering methods make recommendations by mining users’ rating history. However, users’ behaviors in social media are usually implicit, where no ratings are available. This is a One-Class Collaborative Filtering (OCCF) problem with only positive examples. How to distinguish the negative examples from missing data is important for OCCF. Existing OCCF methods tackle this by the statistical properties of users’ historical behavior; however, they ignored the rich content information in social media websites, which provide additional evidence for profiling users and items. In this paper, we propose to improve OCCF accuracy by exploiting the social media content information to find the potential negative examples from the missing user-item pairs. Specifically, we get a content topic feature for each user and item by probabilistic topic modeling and embed them into the Matrix Factorization model. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm can achieve better performance than the state-of-art methods.     

Exploit latent Dirichlet allocation for collaborative filtering

Previous work on the one-class collaborative filtering (OCCF) problem can be roughly categorized into pointwise methods, pairwise methods, and content-based methods. A fundamental assumption of these approaches is that all missing values in the user-item rating matrix are considered negative. However, this assumption may not hold because the missing values may contain negative and positive examples. For example, a user who fails to give positive feedback about an item may not necessarily dislike it; he may simply be unfamiliar with it. Meanwhile, content-based methods, e.g. collaborative topic regression (CTR), usually require textual content information of the items, and thus their applicability is largely limited when the text information is not available. In this paper, we propose to apply the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model on OCCF to address the above-mentioned problems. The basic idea of this approach is that items are regarded as words, users are considered as documents, and the user-item feedback matrix constitutes the corpus. Our model drops the strong assumption that missing values are all negative and only utilizes the observed data to predict a user’s interest. Additionally, the proposed model does not need content information of the items. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms previous methods on various ranking-oriented evaluation metrics. We further combine this method with a matrix factorization-based method to tackle the multi-class collaborative filtering (MCCF) problem, which also achieves better performance on predicting user ratings.     

耦合用户公共特征的单类协同过滤推荐算法

将显式特征与隐式反馈相结合是提高单类协同过滤(OCCF)推荐准确性的常用方法.但目前的研究一般是直接将原始显式特征或交叉特征集成到OCCF模型中,因其难以判断哪些显式特征是真正重要的,故很难获得显著的性能改进.基于此,提出了一种耦合用户公共特征的单类协同过滤推荐算法(UCC-OCCF).首先,建立基于邻居的共同偏好表示...     

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.     

Non-dominated differential context modeling for context-aware recommendations

Context plays an important role in the process of decision making. A user’s preferences on the items may vary from contexts to contexts, e.g., a user may prefer to watch a different type of the movies, if he or she is going to enjoy the movie with partner rather than with children. Context-aware recommender systems, therefore, were developed to adapt the recommendations to different contextual situations, such as time, location, companion, etc. Differential context modeling is a series of recommendation models which incorporate contextual hybrid filtering into the neighborhood based collaborative filtering approaches. In this paper, we propose to enhance differential context modeling by utilizing a non-dominated user neighborhood. The notion of dominance relation was originally proposed in multi-objective optimization, and it was reused to definite non-dominated user neighborhood in collaborative filtering recently. These non-dominated user neighbors refer to the neighbors that dominate others from different perspectives of the user similarities, such as the user-user similarities based on ratings, demographic information, social relationships, and so forth. In this paper, we propose to identify the non-dominated user neighborhood by exploiting user-user similarities over multiple contextual preferences. Our experimental results can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in comparison with popular context-aware collaborative filtering models over five real-world contextual rating data sets.

     

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.     

鲁棒的单类协同排序算法

单类协同过滤(One-class collaborative filtering, OCCF)问题是当前的一大研究热点.之前的研究所提出的算法对噪声数据很敏感,因为训练数据中的噪声数据将给训练过程带来巨大影响,从而导致算法的不准确性.文中引入了Sigmoid成对损失函数和Fidelity成对损失函数,这两个函数具有很好的灵活性,能够和当前最流行的基于矩阵分解(Matrix factorization, MF)的协同过滤算法和基于最近邻(K-nearest neighbor, KNN)的协同过滤算法很好地融合在一起,进而提出了两个鲁棒的单类协同排序算法,解决了之前此类算法对噪声数据的敏感性问题.基于Bootstrap抽样的随机梯度下降法用于优化学习过程.在包含有大量噪声数据点的实际数据集上实验验证,本文提出的算法在各个评价指标下均优于当前最新的单类协同排序算法.     

融合上下文信息与核密度估计的协同过滤推荐

随着互联网信息技术的迅速发展,网络数据量快速增长,如何在海量数据中找到用户感兴趣的信息并实现个性化推荐是目前重要的研究方向。协同过滤算法作为推荐系统中的经典方法被广泛应用于不同场景,但是仍然存在数据稀疏,以及在计算相似度时不能考虑到所有数据的问题,只能够利用具有共同评分的数据,严重影响了推荐的精确度。针对上述存在的问题,提出了一种融合上下文信息与核密度估计的协同过滤个性化推荐算法。该算法通过对用户和项目各自的上下文信息和已经存在的用户评分数据进行处理,通过核密度估计构建用户和项目的兴趣模型,充分挖掘了用户和项目的兴趣分布,以获得更准确的用户和项目兴趣相似度,降低预测评分误差。在公开的数据集上验证表明,将该算法对比传统的协同过滤算法,有效提高了推荐的精确度。     

基于灰色关联度聚类与标签重叠因子结合的协同过滤推荐方法研究

协同过滤算法是目前被广泛运用在推荐系统领域的最成功技术之一,但是面对用户数量的快速增长及相应的评分数据的缺失,推荐系统中的数据稀疏性问题也越来越明显,严重地影响着推荐的质量和效率。针对传统协同过滤算法中的稀疏性问题,采用了基于灰色关联度的方法对用户评分矩阵进行数据标准化处理,得到用户关联度并形成关联度矩阵;然后对关联矩阵中的用户进行关联度聚类,以减少相似性算法的复杂度;之后利用标签重叠因子对传统计算用户相似性的协同过滤算法进行改进,将重叠因子与用户评分以非线性形式进行组合;最后通过实例改进后的算法在推荐精确度上有着较大的提高。     

A movie recommendation algorithm based on genre correlations

Since the late 20th century, the number of Internet users has increased dramatically, as has the number of Web searches performed on a daily basis and the amount of information available. A huge amount of new information is transferred to the Web on a daily basis. However, not all data are reliable and valuable, which implies that it may become more and more difficult to obtain satisfactory results from Web searches. We often iterate searches several times to find what we are looking for. To solve this problem, researchers have suggested the use of recommendation systems. Instead of searching for the same information several times, a recommendation system proposes relevant information. In the Web 2.0 era, recommendation systems often rely on collaborative filtering by users. In general, a collaborative filtering approach based on user information such as gender, location, or preference is effective. However, the traditional approach can fail due to the cold-start problem or the sparsity problem, because initial user information is required for this approach to be effective. Recently, several attempts have been made to tackle these collaborative filtering problems. One such attempt used category correlations of contents. For instance, a movie has genre information provided by movie experts and directors. This category information is more reliable than user ratings. Moreover, newly created content always has category information, allowing avoidance of the cold-start problem. In this study, we consider a movie recommendation system and improve the previous algorithms based on genre correlations to correct its shortcomings. We also test the modified algorithm and analyze the results with respect to two characteristics of genre correlations.     

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.     

融合用户兴趣和评分差异的协同过滤推荐算法

针对传统的协同过滤算法中单一评分相似性计算不准确的问题,提出融合用户兴趣和评分差异的协同过滤推荐算法。将TF-IDF思想运用到用户对标签的权重计算中,并使用指数衰减函数和时间窗口捕捉用户兴趣的变化;根据历史评分矩阵,充分考虑用户评分值差异、评判准则差异、影响力差异和项目影响差异等影响因子,定义了一种评分差异相似性度量算法;最后将用户兴趣相似性和评分差异相似性进行加权融合,获取更加准确的用户邻居,从而预测项目评分并进行推荐。在数据集Movielens的实验表明,提出的算法能有效提高推荐精度。     

基于用户信任和兴趣的概率矩阵分解推荐方法

传统协同过滤推荐算法存在数据稀疏性、冷启动、新用户等问题.随着社交网络和电子商务的迅猛发展,利用用户间的信任关系和用户兴趣提供个性化推荐成为研究的热点.本文提出一种结合用户信任和兴趣的概率矩阵分解（STUIPMF）推荐方法.该方法首先从用户评分角度挖掘用户间的隐性信任关系和潜在兴趣标签,然后利用概率矩阵分解模型对用户评分信息、用户信任关系、用户兴趣标签信息进行矩阵分解,进一步挖掘用户潜在特征,缓解数据稀疏性.在Epinions数据集上进行实验验证,结果表明,该方法能够在一定程度上提高推荐精度,缓解冷启动和新用户问题,同时具有较好的可扩展性.     

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.     

Estimating confidence of individual rating predictions in collaborative filtering recommender systems

Collaborative filtering algorithms predict a rating for an item based on the user’s previous ratings for other items as well as ratings of other users. This approach has gained notable popularity both in academic research and in commercial applications. One aspect of collaborative filtering systems that received interest, but little systematic analysis, is confidence of the rating predictions by collaborative filtering algorithms. In this paper, I address this issue. Specifically: (1) I offer a discussion on the definition of confidence, (2) I propose a method for evaluating performance of confidence estimation algorithms, and (3) I evaluate six different confidence estimation algorithms. Three of those algorithms are introduced in this paper and three have been previously suggested for this purpose. The comparative experimental evaluation demonstrates that two of the algorithms proposed in this study: one using resampling of available ratings and one using noise injection to the available ratings provide the best performance in terms of separation between predictions of high and low confidence. The algorithms that use only the number of ratings available for the user of interest or for the item of interest turned out to be of limited use for confidence estimation.     

一种改进Minhash的分布式协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤推荐算法通过研究用户的喜好,实现从海量数据资源中为用户推荐其感兴趣的内容。衡量用户（资源）的相似性是协同过滤算法的核心内容,在数据量大的系统中,用户（资源）的相似性度量会面临准确性和计算复杂性等问题,影响到推荐效果。提出一种改进的协同过滤推荐算法,提取用户兴趣偏好的多值信息,运用改进Minhash算法度量用户相似性,并结合Mapreduce分布式计算,合理、高效地产生用户邻居,实现对用户的评分推荐。实验结果表明：改进算法能有效改善大数据集的推荐准确性并提高推荐效率,降低了推荐耗时。     

Combining user preferences and user opinions for accurate recommendation

Recommendation systems represent a popular research area with a variety of applications. Such systems provide personalized services to the user and help address the problem of information overload. Traditional recommendation methods such as collaborative filtering suffer from low accuracy because of data sparseness though. We propose a novel recommendation algorithm based on analysis of an online review. The algorithm incorporates two new methods for opinion mining and recommendation. As opposed to traditional methods, which are usually based on the similarity of ratings to infer user preferences, the proposed recommendation method analyzes the difference between the ratings and opinions of the user to identify the user’s preferences. This method considers explicit ratings and implicit opinions, an action that can address the problem of data sparseness. We propose a new feature and opinion extraction method based on the characteristics of online reviews to extract effectively the opinion of the user from a customer review written in Chinese. Based on these methods, we also conduct an empirical study of online restaurant customer reviews to create a restaurant recommendation system and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.     

Collaborative Filtering Using a Regression-Based Approach

The task of collaborative filtering is to predict the preferences of an active user for unseen items given preferences of other users. These preferences are typically expressed as numerical ratings. In this paper, we propose a novel regression-based approach that first learns a number of experts describing relationships in ratings between pairs of items. Based on ratings provided by an active user for some of the items, the experts are combined by using statistical methods to predict the users preferences for the remaining items. The approach was designed to efficiently address the problem of data sparsity and prediction latency that characterise collaborative filtering. Extensive experiments on Eachmovie and Jester benchmark collaborative filtering data show that the proposed regression-based approach achieves improved accuracy and is orders of magnitude faster than the popular neighbour-based alternative. The difference in accuracy was more evident when the number of ratings provided by an active user was small, as is common for real-life recommendation systems. Additional benefits were observed in predicting items with large rating variability. To provide a more detailed characterisation of the proposed algorithm, additional experiments were performed on synthetic data with second-order statistics similar to that of the Eachmovie data. Strong experimental evidence was obtained that the proposed approach can be applied to data over a large range of sparsity scenarios and is superior to non-personalised predictors even when ratings data are very sparse.     

融合类别信息和用户兴趣度的协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤直接根据用户的行为记录去预测其可能感兴趣的项目,是现今最成功、应用最广泛的推荐技术。推荐的准确度受相似性度量方法效果的影响。传统的相似性度量方法主要关注用户共同评分项之间的相似度,忽视了评分项目中的类别信息,在面对数据稀疏性问题时存在一定的不足。针对上述问题,提出基于分类信息 的评分矩阵填充方法,结合用户兴趣相似度计算方法并充分考虑到评分项目的类别信息,使得兴趣度的度量更加符合推荐系统应用的实际情况。实验结果表明,该算法可以弥补传统相似性度量方法的不足,缓解评分数据稀疏对协同过滤算法的影响,能够提高推荐的准确性、多样性和新颖性。     

A collaborative filtering framework based on both local user similarity and global user similarity

Collaborative filtering as a classical method of information retrieval has been widely used in helping people to deal with information overload. In this paper, we introduce the concept of local user similarity and global user similarity, based on surprisal-based vector similarity and the application of the concept of maximin distance in graph theory. Surprisal-based vector similarity expresses the relationship between any two users based on the quantities of information (called surprisal) contained in their ratings. Global user similarity defines two users being similar if they can be connected through their locally similar neighbors. Based on both of Local User Similarity and Global User Similarity, we develop a collaborative filtering framework called LS&GS. An empirical study using the MovieLens dataset shows that our proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art collaborative filtering algorithms.