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.     

A domain model of Web recommender systems based on usage mining and collaborative filtering

Considering the increasing demand of multi-agent systems, the practice of software reuse is essential to the development of such systems. Multi-agent domain engineering is a process for the construction of domain-specific agent-based reusable software artifacts, like domain models, representing the requirements of a family of multi-agent systems in a domain, and frameworks, implementing reusable agent-based design solutions to those requirements. This article describes the domain modeling tasks of the MADEM methodology and a case study on the application of GRAMO, a MADEM technique, for the construction of the domain model of ONTOWUM, specifying the common and variable requirements of a family of Web recommender systems based on usage mining and collaborative filtering.     

Improving memory-based collaborative filtering via similarity updating and prediction modulation

Memory-based collaborative filtering (CF) makes recommendations based on a collection of user preferences for items. The idea underlying this approach is that the interests of an active user will more likely coincide with those of users who share similar preferences to the active user. Hence, the choice and computation of a similarity measure between users is critical to rating items. This work proposes a similarity update method that uses an iterative message passing procedure. Additionally, this work deals with a drawback of using the popular mean absolute error (MAE) for performance evaluation, namely that ignores ratings distribution. A novel modulation method and an accuracy metric are presented in order to minimize the predictive accuracy error and to evenly distribute predicted ratings over true rating scales. Preliminary results show that the proposed similarity update and prediction modulation techniques significantly improve the predicted rankings.     

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.     

A new similarity measure for collaborative filtering to alleviate the new user cold-starting problem

Collaborative filtering is one of the most successful and widely used methods of automated product recommendation in online stores. The most critical component of the method is the mechanism of finding similarities among users using product ratings data so that products can be recommended based on the similarities. The calculation of similarities has relied on traditional distance and vector similarity measures such as Pearson’s correlation and cosine which, however, have been seldom questioned in terms of their effectiveness in the recommendation problem domain. This paper presents a new heuristic similarity measure that focuses on improving recommendation performance under cold-start conditions where only a small number of ratings are available for similarity calculation for each user. Experiments using three different datasets show the superiority of the measure in new user cold-start conditions.     

On the combination of user-based and item-based collaborative filtering

In this paper, we propose two new filtering algorithms which are a combination of user-based and item-based collaborative filtering schemes. The first one, Hybrid-Ib, identifies a reasonably large neighbourhood of similar users and then uses this subset to derive the item-based recommendation model. The second algorithm, Hybrid-CF, starts by locating items similar to the one for which we want a prediction, and then, based on that neighbourhood, it generates its user-based predictions. We start by describing the execution steps of the algorithms and proceed with extended experiments. We conclude that our algorithms are directly comparable to existing filtering approaches, with Hybrid-CF producing favorable or, in the worst case, similar results in all selected evaluation metrics.     

AICF: Attention-based item collaborative filtering

Item-to-item collaborative filtering (short for ICF) has been widely used in ecommerce websites due to his interpretability and simplicity in real-time personalized recommendation. The focus of ICF is to calculate the similarity between items. With the rapid development of machine learning in recent years, it takes similarity model instead of cosine similarity and Pearson coefficient to calculate the similarity between items in recommendation. However, the existing similarity models can not sufficient to express the preferences of users for different items. In this work, we propose a novel attention-based item collaborative filtering model(AICF) which adopts three different attention mechanisms to estimate the weights of historical items that users have interacted with. Compared with the state-of-the-art recommendation models, the AICF model with simple attention mechanism Self-Attention can better estimate the weight of historical items on non-sparse data sets. Due to depth models can model complex connection between items, our model with the more complex Transformer achieves superior recommendation performance on sparse data. Extensive experiments on ML-1M and Pinterest-20 show that the proposed model greatly outperforms other novel models in recommendation accuracy and provides users with personalized recommendation list more in line with their interests.     

Mining fuzzy temporal association rules by item lifespans

Data mining is the process of extracting desirable knowledge or interesting patterns from existing databases for specific purposes. In real-world applications, transactions may contain quantitative values and each item may have a lifespan from a temporal database. In this paper, we thus propose a data mining algorithm for deriving fuzzy temporal association rules. It first transforms each quantitative value into a fuzzy set using the given membership functions. Meanwhile, item lifespans are collected and recorded in a temporal information table through a transformation process. The algorithm then calculates the scalar cardinality of each linguistic term of each item. A mining process based on fuzzy counts and item lifespans is then performed to find fuzzy temporal association rules. Experiments are finally performed on two simulation datasets and the foodmart dataset to show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed approach.     

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.     

Property-based collaborative filtering for health-aware recommender systems

Recommender systems aim at solving the problem of information overload by selecting items (commercial products, educational assets, TV programs, etc.) that match the consumers’ interests and preferences. Recently, there have been approaches to drive the recommendations by the information stored in electronic health records, for which the traditional strategies applied in online shopping, e-learning, entertainment and other areas have several pitfalls. This paper addresses those problems by introducing a new filtering strategy, centered on the properties that characterize the items and the users. Preliminary experiments with real users have proved that this approach outperforms previous ones in terms of consumers’ satisfaction with the recommended items. The benefits are especially apparent among people with specific health concerns.     

Hiding collaborative recommendation association rules

The concept of Privacy-Preserving has recently been proposed in response to the concerns of preserving personal or sensible information derived from data mining algorithms. For example, through data mining, sensible information such as private information or patterns may be inferred from non-sensible information or unclassified data. There have been two types of privacy concerning data mining. Output privacy tries to hide the mining results by minimally altering the data. Input privacy tries to manipulate the data so that the mining result is not affected or minimally affected. For output privacy in hiding association rules, current approaches require hidden rules or patterns to be given in advance [10, 18–21, 24, 27]. This selection of rules would require data mining process to be executed first. Based on the discovered rules and privacy requirements, hidden rules or patterns are then selected manually. However, for some applications, we are interested in hiding certain constrained classes of association rules such as collaborative recommendation association rules [15, 22]. To hide such rules, the pre-process of finding these hidden rules can be integrated into the hiding process as long as the recommended items are given. In this work, we propose two algorithms, DCIS (Decrease Confidence by Increase Support) and DCDS (Decrease Confidence by Decrease Support), to automatically hiding collaborative recommendation association rules without pre-mining and selection of hidden rules. Examples illustrating the proposed algorithms are given. Numerical simulations are performed to show the various effects of the algorithms. Recommendations of appropriate usage of the proposed algorithms based on the characteristics of databases are reported. Leon Wang received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1984. From 1984 to 1987, he was an assistant professor in mathematics at University of New Haven, Connecticut, USA. From 1987 to 1994, he joined New York Institute of Technology as a research associate in the Electromagnetic Lab and assistant/associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. From 1994 to 2001, he joined I-Shou University in Taiwan as associate professor in the Department of Information Management. In 1996, he was the Director of Computing Center. From 1997 to 2000, he was the Chairman of Department of Information Management. In 2001, he was Professor and director of Library, all in I-Shou University. In 2002, he was Associate Professor and Chairman in Information Management at National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In 2003, he rejoined New York Institute of Technology. Dr.Wang has published 33 journal papers, 102 conference papers, and 5 book chapters, in the areas of data mining, machine learning, expert systems, and fuzzy databases, etc. Dr. Wang is a member of IEEE, Chinese Fuzzy System Association Taiwan, Chinese Computer Association, and Chinese Information Management Association. Ayat Jafari received the Ph.D. degree from City University of New York. He has conducted considerable research in the areas of Computer Communication Networks, Local Area Networks, and Computer Network Security, and published many technical articles. His interests and expertise are in the area of Computer Networks, Signal Processing, and Digital Communications. He is currently the Chairman of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department of New York Institute of Technology. Tzung-Pei Hong received his B.S. degree in chemical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1985, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science and information engineering from National Chiao-Tung University in 1992. He was a faculty at the Department of Computer Science in Chung-Hua Polytechnic Institute from 1992 to 1994, and at the Department of Information Management in I-Shou University from 1994 to 2001. He was in charge of the whole computerization and library planning for National University of Kaohsiung in Preparation from 1997 to 2000, and served as the first director of the library and computer center in National University of Kaohsiung from 2000 to 2001 and as the Dean of Academic Affairs from 2003 to 2006. He is currently a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering. His current research interests include machine learning, data mining, soft computing, management information systems, and www applications. Springer     

A hybrid of sequential rules and collaborative filtering for product recommendation

Customers’ purchase behavior may vary over time. Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) methods make recommendations to a target customer based on the purchase behavior of customers whose preferences are similar to those of the target customer; however, the methods do not consider how the customers’ purchase behavior may vary over time. In contrast, the sequential rule-based recommendation method analyzes customers’ purchase behavior over time to extract sequential rules in the form: purchase behavior in previous periods ⇒ purchase behavior in the current period. If a target customer’s purchase behavior history is similar to the conditional part of the rule, then his/her purchase behavior in the current period is deemed to be the consequent part of the rule. Although the sequential rule method considers the sequence of customers’ purchase behavior over time, it does not utilize the target customer’s purchase data for the current period. To resolve the above problems, this work proposes a novel hybrid recommendation method that combines the segmentation-based sequential rule method with the segmentation-based KNN-CF method. The proposed method uses customers’ RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary) values to cluster customers into groups with similar RFM values. For each group of customers, sequential rules are extracted from the purchase sequences of that group to make recommendations. Meanwhile, the segmentation-based KNN-CF method provides recommendations based on the target customer’s purchase data for the current period. Then, the results of the two methods are combined to make final recommendations. Experiment results show that the hybrid method outperforms traditional CF methods.     

A novel collaborative filtering approach for recommending ranked items

In recent years, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has proven to be one of the most successful techniques used in recommendation systems. Since current CF systems estimate the ratings of not-yet-rated items based on other items’ ratings, these CF systems fail to recommend products when users’ preferences are not expressed in numbers. In many practical situations, however, users’ preferences are represented by ranked lists rather than numbers, such as lists of movies ranked according to users’ preferences. Therefore, this study proposes a novel collaborative filtering methodology for product recommendation when the preference of each user is expressed by multiple ranked lists of items. Accordingly, a four-staged methodology is developed to predict the rankings of not-yet-ranked items for the active user. Finally, a series of experiments is performed, and the results indicate that the proposed methodology produces high-quality recommendations.     

Efficient maintenance of multiple-level association rules for deletion of records

Developing an efficient algorithm that can maintain discovered information as a database changes is quite important in data mining. Many proposed algorithms focused on a single level, and did not utilize previously mined information in incrementally growing databases. In the past, we proposed an incremental mining algorithm for maintenance of multiple-level association rules as new transactions were inserted. Deletion of records in databases is, however, commonly seen in real-world applications. In this paper, we thus attempt to extend our previous approach to solve this issue. The concept of pre-large itemsets is used to reduce the need for rescanning original databases and to save maintenance costs. A pre-large itemset is not truly large, but promises to be large in the future. A lower support threshold and an upper support threshold are used to realize this concept. The two user-specified upper and lower support thresholds make the pre-large itemsets act as a gap to avoid small itemsets becoming large in the updated database when transactions are deleted. A new algorithm is thus proposed based on the concept to maintain discovered multiple-level association rules for deletion of records. The proposed algorithm doesn＇t need to rescan the original database until a number of records have been deleted. It can thus save much maintenance time.     

Integrating knowledge flow mining and collaborative filtering to support document recommendation

Knowledge is a critical resource that organizations use to gain and maintain competitive advantages. In the constantly changing business environment, organizations must exploit effective and efficient methods of preserving, sharing and reusing knowledge in order to help knowledge workers find task-relevant information. Hence, an important issue is how to discover and model the knowledge flow (KF) of workers from their historical work records. The objectives of a knowledge flow model are to understand knowledge workers’ task-needs and the ways they reference documents, and then provide adaptive knowledge support. This work proposes hybrid recommendation methods based on the knowledge flow model, which integrates KF mining, sequential rule mining and collaborative filtering techniques to recommend codified knowledge. These KF-based recommendation methods involve two phases: a KF mining phase and a KF-based recommendation phase. The KF mining phase identifies each worker’s knowledge flow by analyzing his/her knowledge referencing behavior (information needs), while the KF-based recommendation phase utilizes the proposed hybrid methods to proactively provide relevant codified knowledge for the worker. Therefore, the proposed methods use workers’ preferences for codified knowledge as well as their knowledge referencing behavior to predict their topics of interest and recommend task-related knowledge. Using data collected from a research institute laboratory, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed hybrid methods and compare them with the traditional CF method. The results of experiments demonstrate that utilizing the document preferences and knowledge referencing behavior of workers can effectively improve the quality of recommendations and facilitate efficient knowledge sharing.     

基于关联规则的本体相似度综合计算方法

目前较为流行的最小风险的本体映射(RiMOM)框架通过采用“多策略”的思想虽然取得了一定的效果,但其框架比较臃肿庞杂,且采用的计算结构相似度的选择策略存在一定的局限性。针对上述问题,提出一种基于关联规则的本体相似度综合计算方法。首先,构造关联规则的结构“树”模型,得出相应事务集;其次,进行关联规则的挖掘,根据关联规则计算概念结构的相似性;然后,计算概念的实例、属性、名称的相似度;最后,对多个特征相似度进行综合加权处理,实现本体相似度的最优计算。实验结果表明,该方法较RiMOM在查全率、查准率方面均有较大提高;同时该方法省去了策略选择的步骤,有效降低了时间复杂度。     

Pessimists and optimists: Improving collaborative filtering through sentiment analysis

This work presents a novel application of Sentiment Analysis in Recommender Systems by categorizing users according to the average polarity of their comments. These categories are used as attributes in Collaborative Filtering algorithms. To test this solution a new corpus of opinions on movies obtained from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has been generated, so both ratings and comments are available. The experiments stress the informative value of comments. By applying Sentiment Analysis approaches some Collaborative Filtering algorithms can be improved in rating prediction tasks. The results indicate that we obtain a more reliable prediction considering only the opinion text (RMSE of 1.868), than when apply similarities over the entire user community (RMSE of 2.134) and sentiment analysis can be advantageous to recommender systems.     

Collaborative filtering based on workflow space

The traditional recommender systems are usually oriented to general situations in daily lives (e.g. recommend movies, books, music, news and etc.), but seldom cover the recommendation scenarios for the collaborative team environments. We have done an explorative study on collaborative filtering mechanism for collaborative team environments, which is some kind of multi-dimensional recommender systems problem with consideration of workflow context. This paper proposed 3-dimensional workflow space model, and investigated the new similarities measure between members in workflow space. Then, the new similarities measure is utilized into collaborative filtering for recommender systems in collaborative team environments. At last, the efficiency and usability of the proposed method are validated by experiments referring to a real-world collaborative team of a manufacturing enterprise.     

One-and-only item recommendation with fuzzy logic techniques

Recommender systems anticipate users’ needs by suggesting items that are likely to interest them. Most existing systems employ collaborative filtering (CF) techniques, searching for regularities in the way users have rated items. While in general a successful approach, CF cannot cope well with so-called one-and-only items, that is: items of which there is only one single instance (like an event), and which as such cannot be repetitively “sold”. Typically such items are evaluated only after they have ceased being available, thereby thwarting the classical CF strategy. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for recommending one-and-only items. It uses fuzzy logic, which allows to reflect the graded/uncertain information in the domain, and to extend the CF paradigm, overcoming limitations of existing techniques. A possible application in the context of trade exhibition recommendation for e-government is discussed to illustrate the proposed conceptual framework.     

基于元相似度的推荐算法*

提出了一个新的相似度概念——元相似度,并在此基础上对标准的协同过滤算法进行了改进.元相似度即相似度的相似度,与相似度相比元相似度是基于相似度矩阵而不是相关矩阵计算得出的.即使是在相关矩阵中未购买过任何相同商品的两个用户也可以用元相似度反映他们之间的相似关系,这样在一定程度上解决了冷启动和矩阵稀疏性问题.综合考虑元相似度...