Privacy-preserving hybrid collaborative filtering on cross distributed data

Data collected for collaborative filtering (CF) purposes might be cross distributed between two online vendors, even competing companies. Such corporations might want to integrate their data to provide more precise and reliable recommendations. However, due to privacy, legal, and financial concerns, they do not desire to disclose their private data to each other. If privacy-preserving measures are introduced, they might decide to generate predictions based on their distributed data collaboratively. In this study, we investigate how to offer hybrid CF-based referrals with decent accuracy on cross distributed data (CDD) between two e-commerce sites while maintaining their privacy. Our proposed schemes should prevent data holders from learning true ratings and rated items held by each other while still allowing them to provide accurate CF services efficiently. We perform real data-based experiments to evaluate our proposals in terms of accuracy. The results show that the proposed methods are able to provide precise predictions. Moreover, we analyze our schemes in terms of privacy and supplementary costs. We demonstrate that our schemes are secure, and online overhead costs due to privacy concerns are insignificant.     

A new hybrid recommendation algorithm with privacy

Providing accurate and dependable recommendations efficiently while preserving privacy is essential for e‐commerce sites to recruit new customers and keep the existing ones. Such sites might be able to increase their sales and profits while customers can obtain precise and trustworthy predictions if they use appropriate collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms without deeply jeopardizing users' privacy. We propose a new recommendation algorithm, which is a hybrid‐memory and model‐based algorithm to generate truthful referrals efficiently. Moreover, we use randomization techniques to preserve users' privacy while still offering CF services with decent accuracy. We perform real data‐based trials and analyse our proposed schemes in terms of privacy, accuracy, and performance.     

An algorithm for efficient privacy-preserving item-based collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) methods are widely adopted by existing recommender systems, which can analyze and predict user “ratings” or “preferences” of newly generated items based on user historical behaviors. However, privacy issue arises in this process as sensitive user private data are collected by the recommender server. Recently proposed privacy-preserving collaborative filtering (PPCF) methods, using computation-intensive cryptography techniques or data perturbation techniques are not appropriate in real online services. In this paper, an efficient privacy-preserving item-based collaborative filtering algorithm is proposed, which can protect user privacy during online recommendation process without compromising recommendation accuracy and efficiency. The proposed method is evaluated using the Netflix Prize dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms a randomized perturbation based PPCF solution and a homomorphic encryption based PPCF solution by over 14X and 386X, respectively, in recommendation efficiency while achieving similar or even better recommendation accuracy.     

基于差分隐私和SVD++的协同过滤算法

协同过滤技术在推荐系统的实现中具有广泛的应用,协同过滤以用户对商品项目的评价分数为依据,而这些评价有可能反映用户某些不欲为人知的喜好特点,因此,对具备隐私保护能力的协同过滤模型的研究引起了普遍的关注.SVD++是当前最为常用的协同过滤模型之一,差分隐私模型则是近十年来隐私保护理论最重要的研究进展之一,将两者相结合提出3种基于差分隐私和SVD++的协同过滤模型:基于梯度扰动的SVD++隐私保护模型、基于目标函数扰动的SVD++隐私保护模型和基于输出结果扰动的隐私保护模型.理论分析和实验结果显示,所提出的算法不仅能为用户的隐私安全提供可靠的保障,而且还可保持较高的预测准确度.     

基于谱聚类和扩展朴素贝叶斯的混合推荐算法

随着电子商务的发展,基于协同过滤的推荐算法越来越受欢迎,与此同时,该算法的缺陷也越来越明显,如数据稀疏性、系统可扩展性等。为此,提出一种混合型推荐算法。该混合算法首先利用谱聚类方法,根据图谱理论将聚类问题转化为图的分割问题,寻找相似数据群;然后,利用扩展逻辑回归的朴素贝叶斯算法对聚类结果建立预测模型;最后使用增量式更新的方法,在不全部重新训练模型的基础上,对模型进行局部修改。实验结果表明,该算法较传统的协同过滤算法在一定程度上克服了数据稀疏性和冷启动问题,降低了计算复杂度,并且具有更好的准确性和可扩展性。     

Outlier-eliminated k-means clustering algorithm based on differential privacy preservation

Individual privacy may be compromised during the process of mining for valuable information, and the potential for data mining is hindered by the need to preserve privacy. It is well known that k-means clustering algorithms based on differential privacy require preserving privacy while maintaining the availability of clustering. However, it is difficult to balance both aspects in traditional algorithms. In this paper, an outlier-eliminated differential privacy (OEDP) k-means algorithm is proposed that both preserves privacy and improves clustering efficiency. The proposed approach selects the initial centre points in accordance with the distribution density of data points, and adds Laplacian noise to the original data for privacy preservation. Both a theoretical analysis and comparative experiments were conducted. The theoretical analysis shows that the proposed algorithm satisfies ε-differential privacy. Furthermore, the experimental results show that, compared to other methods, the proposed algorithm effectively preserves data privacy and improves the clustering results in terms of accuracy, stability, and availability.     

Fuzzy-genetic approach to recommender systems based on a novel hybrid user model

The main strengths of collaborative filtering (CF), the most successful and widely used filtering technique for recommender systems, are its cross-genre or ‘outside the box’ recommendation ability and that it is completely independent of any machine-readable representation of the items being recommended. However, CF suffers from sparsity, scalability, and loss of neighbor transitivity. CF techniques are either memory-based or model-based. While the former is more accurate, its scalability compared to model-based is poor. An important contribution of this paper is a hybrid fuzzy-genetic approach to recommender systems that retains the accuracy of memory-based CF and the scalability of model-based CF. Using hybrid features, a novel user model is built that helped in achieving significant reduction in system complexity, sparsity, and made the neighbor transitivity relationship hold. The user model is employed to find a set of like-minded users within which a memory-based search is carried out. This set is much smaller than the entire set, thus improving system’s scalability. Besides our proposed approaches are scalable and compact in size, computational results reveal that they outperform the classical approach.     

基于社交信任聚类的混合推荐算法

推荐系统能够有效地解决信息过载问题,其中,协同过滤（collaborative filtering,简称CF）是推荐系统广泛采用的技术之一.然而传统的CF技术存在可扩展性差、数据稀疏和推荐结果精度低等问题.为了提高推荐质量,将信任关系融合到推荐系统中,采用聚类（FCM）方法,对信任关系进行聚类.利用信任类预测用户间的隐式信任,最后将信任关系与用户-项目关系线性融合进行推荐.在Douban和Epinions数据集上的实验结果表明,与传统的基于CF、基于信任和用户项目聚类的推荐算法相比,该算法能够大幅度地改进推荐质量,提升算法的时间效率.     

Utilizing various sparsity measures for enhancing accuracy of collaborative recommender systems based on local and global similarities

Collaborative filtering is a popular recommendation technique, which suggests items to users by exploiting past user-item interactions involving affinities between pairs of users or items. In spite of their huge success they suffer from a range of problems, the most fundamental being that of data sparsity. When the rating matrix is sparse, local similarity measures yield a poor neighborhood set thus affecting the recommendation quality. In such cases global similarity measures can be used to enrich the neighborhood set by considering transitive relationships among users even in the absence of any common experiences. In this work we propose a recommender system framework utilizing both local and global similarities, taking into account not only the overall sparsity in the rating data, but also sparsity at the user-item level. Several schemes are proposed, based on various sparsity measures pertaining to the active user, for the estimation of the parameter α, that allows the variation of the importance given to the global user similarity with regards to local user similarity. Furthermore, we propose an automatic scheme for weighting the various sparsity measures, through evolutionary approach, to obtain a unified measure of sparsity (UMS). In order to take maximum possible advantage of the various sparsity measures relating to an active user, a scheme based on the UMS is suggested for estimating α. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed estimates of α, markedly, outperform the schemes for which α is kept constant across all predictions (fixed-α schemes), on accuracy of predicted ratings.     

基于用户模糊聚类的协同过滤推荐研究

传统的协同过滤算法没有考虑用户的自身信息对评分的影响,存在的数据稀疏性、扩展性差等弊端直接影响了推荐系统的推荐质量。对此提出了一种基于用户情景模糊聚类的协同过滤推荐算法。首先根据用户情景信息利用模糊聚类算法得到情景相似的用户群分类,然后在进行协同过滤前预先通过Slope One算法填充用户一项目评分矩阵,以有效改善数据稀疏性和实时性。实验结果表明,改进后的算法在推荐精度上有较大提高。     

The impact of data obfuscation on the accuracy of collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a widely-used technique for generating personalized recommendations. CF systems are typically based on a central storage of user profiles, i.e., the ratings given by users to items. Such centralized storage introduces potential privacy breach, since all the user profiles may be accessible by untrusted parties when breaking the access control of the centralized system. Hence, recent studies have focused on enhancing the privacy of CF users by distributing their user profiles across multiple repositories and obfuscating the user profiles to partially hide the actual user ratings. This work combines these two techniques and investigates the unavoidable side effect of data obfuscation: the reduction of the accuracy of the generated CF predictions. The evaluation, which was conducted using three different datasets, shows that considerable parts of the user profiles can be modified without observing a substantial decrease of the CF prediction accuracy. The evaluation also indicates what parts of the user profiles are required for generating accurate CF predictions. In addition, we conducted an exploratory user study that reveals positive attitude of users towards the data obfuscation.     

Cluster ensembles in collaborative filtering recommendation

Recommender systems, which recommend items of information that are likely to be of interest to the users, and filter out less favored data items, have been developed. Collaborative filtering is a widely used recommendation technique. It is based on the assumption that people who share the same preferences on some items tend to share the same preferences on other items. Clustering techniques are commonly used for collaborative filtering recommendation. While cluster ensembles have been shown to outperform many single clustering techniques in the literature, the performance of cluster ensembles for recommendation has not been fully examined. Thus, the aim of this paper is to assess the applicability of cluster ensembles to collaborative filtering recommendation. In particular, two well-known clustering techniques (self-organizing maps (SOM) and k-means), and three ensemble methods (the cluster-based similarity partitioning algorithm (CSPA), hypergraph partitioning algorithm (HGPA), and majority voting) are used. The experimental results based on the Movielens dataset show that cluster ensembles can provide better recommendation performance than single clustering techniques in terms of recommendation accuracy and precision. In addition, there are no statistically significant differences between either the three SOM ensembles or the three k-means ensembles. Either the SOM or k-means ensembles could be considered in the future as the baseline collaborative filtering technique.     

An automatic fuzzy c-means algorithm for image segmentation

Fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm is one of the most popular methods for image segmentation. However, the standard FCM algorithm must be estimated by expertise users to determine the cluster number. So, we propose an automatic fuzzy clustering algorithm (AFCM) for automatically grouping the pixels of an image into different homogeneous regions when the number of clusters is not known beforehand. In order to get better segmentation quality, this paper presents an algorithm based on AFCM algorithm, called automatic modified fuzzy c-means cluster segmentation algorithm (AMFCM). AMFCM algorithm incorporates spatial information into the membership function for clustering. The spatial function is the weighted summation of the membership function in the neighborhood of each pixel under consideration. Experimental results show that AMFCM algorithm not only can spontaneously estimate the appropriate number of clusters but also can get better segmentation quality.     

New Recommender Framework: Combining Semantic Similarity Fusion and Bicluster Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) systems help address information overload, by using the preferences of users in a community to make personal recommendations for other users. The widespread use of these systems has exposed some well‐known limitations, such as sparsity, scalability, and cold‐start, which can lead to poor recommendations. During the last years, a great number of works have focused on the improvement of CF, but they do not solve all its problems efficiently. In this article, we present a new approach that applies semantic similarity fusion as well as biclustering to alleviate the aforementioned problems. The experimental results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach over the benchmark CF methods.     

嵌入LDA主题模型的协同过滤推荐算法

协同过滤推荐算法由于其推荐的准确性和高效性已经成为推荐领域最流行的推荐算法之一。该算法通过分析用户的历史评分记录来构建用户兴趣模型,进而为用户产生一组推荐。然而,推荐系统中用户的评分记录是极为有限的,导致传统协同过滤算法面临严重的数据稀疏性问题。针对此问题,提出了一种改进的嵌入LDA主题模型的协同过滤推荐算法(ULR-CF算法)。该算法利用LDA主题建模方法在用户项目标签集上挖掘潜在的主题信息,进而结合文档-主题概率分布矩阵和评分矩阵来共同度量用户和项目相似度。实验结果表明,提出的ULR-CF算法可以有效缓解数据稀疏性问题,并能显著提高推荐系统的准确性。     

基于影响集的协作过滤推荐算法

传统的基于用户的协作过滤推荐系统由于使用了基于内存的最近邻查询算法,因此表现出可扩展性差、缺乏稳定性的缺点.针对可扩展性的问题,提出的基于项目的协作过滤算法,仍然不能解决数据稀疏带来的推荐质量下降的问题(稳定性差).从影响集的概念中得到启发,提出一种新的基于项目的协作过滤推荐算法CFBIS(collaborative filtering based on influence sets),利用当前对象的影响集来提高该资源的评价密度,并为这种新的推荐机制定义了计算预测评分的方法.实验结果表明,该算法相对于传统的只基于最近邻产生推荐的项目协作过滤算法而言,可有效缓解由数据集稀疏带来的问题,显著提高推荐系统的推荐质量.     

基于双边兴趣的社交网好友推荐方法研究

随着社交网的广泛流行,用户的数量也急剧增加,针对社交网络用户难以在海量用户环境中快速发现其可能感兴趣的潜在好友的问题,各种推荐算法应运而生,协同过滤算法便是其中最为成功的思想。然而目前的协同过滤算法普遍存在数据稀疏性和推荐精度低等问题,为此提出一种基于动态K-means聚类双边兴趣协同过滤好友推荐算法。该算法结合动态K-means算法对用户进行聚类以降低稀疏性,同时提出相似度可信值的概念调整相似度计算方法以提高相似度精度;利用调整后的相似度分别从用户的吸引与偏好两方面计算近邻用户集,综合考虑这两方面近邻对当前用户的择友影响来生成推荐列表。实验证明,相较于基于用户的协同过滤算法,该算法能有效提高系统的推荐精度与效率。     

Exponential Fuzzy C-Means for Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering(CF) is one of the most popular techniques behind the success of recommendation system.It predicts the interest of users by collecting information from past users who have the same opinions.The most popular approaches used in CF research area are Matrix factorization methods such as SVD.However,many wellknown recommendation systems do not use this method but still stick with Neighborhood models because of simplicity and explainability.There are some concerns that limit neighborhood models to achieve higher prediction accuracy.To address these concerns,we propose a new exponential fuzzy clustering(XFCM) algorithm by reformulating the clustering’s objective function with an exponential equation in order to improve the method for membership assignment.The proposed method assigns data to the clusters by aggressively excluding irrelevant data,which is better than other fuzzy C-means(FCM) variants.The experiments show that XFCM-based CF improved 6.9% over item-based method and 3.0% over SVD in terms of mean absolute error for 100 K and 1 M MovieLens dataset.     

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.     

A hybrid expert system approach for telemonitoring of vocal fold pathology

Acoustical parameters extracted from the recorded voice samples are actively pursued for accurate detection of vocal fold pathology. Most of the system for detection of vocal fold pathology uses high quality voice samples. This paper proposes a hybrid expert system approach to detect vocal fold pathology using the compressed/low quality voice samples which includes feature extraction using wavelet packet transform, clustering based feature weighting and classification. In order to improve the robustness and discrimination ability of the wavelet packet transform based features (raw features), we propose clustering based feature weighting methods including k-means clustering (KMC), fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering and subtractive clustering (SBC). We have investigated the effectiveness of raw and weighted features (obtained after applying feature weighting methods) using four different classifiers: Least Square Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) with radial basis kernel, k-means nearest neighbor (kNN) classifier, probabilistic neural network (PNN) and classification and regression tree (CART). The proposed hybrid expert system approach gives a promising classification accuracy of 100% using the feature weighting methods and also it has potential application in remote detection of vocal fold pathology.