This work formulates a novel song recommender system as a matrix completion problem that benefits from collaborative filtering through Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and content-based filtering via total variation (TV) on graphs. The graphs encode both playlist proximity information and song similarity, using a rich combination of audio, meta-data and social features. As we demonstrate, our hybrid recommendation system is very versatile and incorporates several well-known methods while outperforming them. Particularly, we show on real-world data that our model overcomes w.r.t. two evaluation metrics the recommendation of models solely based on low-rank information, graph-based information or a combination of both.
This work explores the ability of collective matrix factorization models in recommender systems to make predictions about users and items for which there is side information available but no feedback or interactions data, and proposes a new formulation with a faster cold-start prediction formula that can be used in real-time systems. While these cold-start recommendations are not as good as warm-start ones, they were found to be of better quality than non-personalized recommendations, and predictions about new users were found to be more reliable than those about new items. The formulation pro…
College of Economics and Management, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学经济管理学院）
The traditional social recommendation algorithm ignores the following fact: the preferences of users with trust relationships are not necessarily similar, and the consideration of user preference similarity should be limited to specific areas. A social trust and preference segmentation-based matrix factorization (SPMF) recommendation system is proposed to solve the above-mentioned problems. Experimental results based on the Ciao and Epinions datasets show that the accuracy of the SPMF algorithm is significantly higher than that of some state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms. The proposed S…
Helsinki Research Center（赫尔辛基研究中心）；Europe Cloud Service Competence Center（欧洲云服务能力中心）；Huawei Technologies Oy (Finland) Co. Ltd（华为技术有限公司（芬兰））
We introduce the federated multi-view matrix factorization method that extends the federated learning framework to matrix factorization with multiple data sources. Our method is able to learn the multi-view model without transferring the user's personal data to a central server. As far as we are aware this is the first federated model to provide recommendations using multi-view matrix factorization. The model is rigorously evaluated on three datasets on production settings. Empirical validation confirms that federated multi-view matrix factorization outperforms simpler methods that do not take…
This paper aims at a better understanding of matrix factorization (MF), factorization machines (FM), and their combination with deep algorithms' application in recommendation systems. Specifically, this paper will focus on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and its derivations, e.g Funk-SVD, SVD++, etc. Step-by-step formula calculation and explainable pictures are displayed. What's more, we explain the DeepFM model in which FM is assisted by deep learning. Through numerical examples, we attempt to tie the theory to real-world problems.
This work explores non-negative low-rank matrix factorization based on regularized Poisson models (PF or "Poisson factorization" for short) for recommender systems with implicit-feedback data. The properties of Poisson likelihood allow a shortcut for very fast computations over zero-valued inputs, and oftentimes results in very sparse factors for both users and items. Compared to HPF (a popular Bayesian formulation of the problem with hierarchical priors), the frequentist optimization-based approach presented here tends to produce better top-N recommendations with significantly shorter fitting…
When recommending personalized top-$k$ items to users, how can we recommend the items diversely to them while satisfying their needs? Aggregately diversified recommender systems aim to recommend a variety of items across whole users without sacrificing the recommendation accuracy. They increase the exposure opportunities of various items, which in turn increase potential revenue of sellers as well as user satisfaction. However, it is challenging to tackle aggregate-level diversity with a matrix factorization (MF), one of the most common recommendation model, since skewed real world data lead t…
College of Information and Computer Sciences（信息与计算机科学学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Department of Statistics and Data Science（统计与数据科学系）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
We consider the problem of online collaborative filtering in the online setting, where items are recommended to the users over time. At each time step, the user (selected by the environment) consumes an item (selected by the agent) and provides a rating of the selected item. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for online matrix factorization recommendation that combines linear bandits and alternating least squares. In this formulation, the bandit feedback is equal to the difference between the ratings of the best and selected items. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm…
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学学院）；Zhejiang University-LianlianPay Joint Research Center（浙江大学-连连支付联合研究中心）
Recommendation from implicit feedback is a highly challenging task due to the lack of the reliable observed negative data. A popular and effective approach for implicit recommendation is to treat unobserved data as negative but downweight their confidence. Naturally, how to assign confidence weights and how to handle the large number of the unobserved data are two key problems for implicit recommendation models. However, existing methods either pursuit fast learning by manually assigning simple confidence weights, which lacks flexibility and may create empirical bias in evaluating user's prefe…
National Chiao Tung Univ.（国立交通大学）；Inst. of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan（中央研究院资讯科学研究所）；The Pennsylvania State Univ.（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
In contrast to traditional online videos, live multi-streaming supports real-time social interactions between multiple streamers and viewers, such as donations. However, donation and multi-streaming channel recommendations are challenging due to complicated streamer and viewer relations, asymmetric communications, and the tradeoff between personal interests and group interactions. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Stream Party (MSP) and formulate a new multi-streaming recommendation problem, called Donation and MSP Recommendation (DAMRec). We propose Multi-stream Party Recommender System (MARS…
IRIT, Université de Toulouse, CNRS（图卢兹大学 IRIT 研究所、法国国家科学研究中心）；ISAE-SUPAERO, Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学 ISAE-SUPAERO 高等航空与航天学院）
We introduce a new non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method for ordinal data, called OrdNMF. Ordinal data are categorical data which exhibit a natural ordering between the categories. In particular, they can be found in recommender systems, either with explicit data (such as ratings) or implicit data (such as quantized play counts). OrdNMF is a probabilistic latent factor model that generalizes Bernoulli-Poisson factorization (BePoF) and Poisson factorization (PF) applied to binarized data. Contrary to these methods, OrdNMF circumvents binarization and can exploit a more informative repr…
Much like other learning-based models, recommender systems can be affected by biases in the training data. While typical evaluation metrics (e.g. hit rate) are not concerned with them, some categories of final users are heavily affected by these biases. In this work, we propose using multiple triplet losses terms to extract meaningful and robust representations of users and items. We empirically evaluate the soundness of such representations through several "bias-aware" evaluation metrics, as well as in terms of stability to changes in the training set and agreement of the predictions variance…
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩郡分校）；LANL（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）
Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) with missing-value completion is a well-known effective Collaborative Filtering (CF) method used to provide personalized user recommendations. However, traditional CF relies on the privacy-invasive collection of users' explicit and implicit feedback to build a central recommender model. One-shot federated learning has recently emerged as a method to mitigate the privacy problem while addressing the traditional communication bottleneck of federated learning. In this paper, we present the first unsupervised one-shot federated CF implementation, named FedSP…
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；East China Jiaotong University（华东交通大学）；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
Sparsity of user-to-item rating data becomes one of challenging issues in the recommender systems, which severely deteriorates the recommendation performance. Fortunately, context-aware recommender systems can alleviate the sparsity problem by making use of some auxiliary information, such as the information of both the users and items. In particular, the visual information of items, such as the movie poster, can be considered as the supplement for item description documents, which helps to obtain more item features. In this paper, we focus on movie recommender system and propose a probabilist…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Exploiting low-rank structure of the user-item rating matrix has been the crux of many recommendation engines. However, existing recommendation engines force raters with heterogeneous behavior profiles to map their intrinsic rating scales to a common rating scale (e.g. 1-5). This non-linear transformation of the rating scale shatters the low-rank structure of the rating matrix, therefore resulting in a poor fit and consequentially, poor recommendations. In this paper, we propose Clustered Monotone Transforms for Rating Factorization (CMTRF), a novel approach to perform regression up to unknown…
AI Department, Ant Financial Services Group（蚂蚁金融服务集团人工智能部门）
Points of interest (POI) recommendation has been drawn much attention recently due to the increasing popularity of location-based networks, e.g., Foursquare and Yelp. Among the existing approaches to POI recommendation, Matrix Factorization (MF) based techniques have proven to be effective. However, existing MF approaches suffer from two major problems: (1) Expensive computations and storages due to the centralized model training mechanism: the centralized learners have to maintain the whole user-item rating matrix, and potentially huge low rank matrices. (2) Privacy issues: the users' prefere…
Politecnico di Bari（巴里理工大学）；Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）
Collaborative filtering models based on matrix factorization and learned similarities using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have gained significant attention in recent years. This is, in part, because ANNs have demonstrated good results in a wide variety of recommendation tasks. The introduction of ANNs within the recommendation ecosystem has been recently questioned, raising several comparisons in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. One aspect most of these comparisons have in common is their focus on accuracy, neglecting other evaluation dimensions important for the recommendation, such…
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Amazon Inc.（亚马逊公司）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) can help customers find more satisfying items in different domains. Existing CDR models mainly use common users or mapping functions as bridges between domains but have very limited exploration in fully utilizing extra knowledge across domains. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the knowledge graph (KG) for CDR, which enables items in different domains to share knowledge. To this end, we first construct a new dataset AmazonKG4CDR from the Freebase KG and a subset (two domain pairs: movies-music, movie-book) of Amazon Review Data. This new dataset facilit…
Università della Svizzera Italiana（意大利瑞士大学）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）
With the popularity of Location-based Social Networks, Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an important task, which learns the users' preferences and mobility patterns to recommend POIs. Previous studies show that incorporating contextual information such as geographical and temporal influences is necessary to improve POI recommendation by addressing the data sparsity problem. However, existing methods model the geographical influence based on the physical distance between POIs and users, while ignoring the temporal characteristics of such geographical influences. In this paper, …
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）
Playlist recommendation involves producing a set of songs that a user might enjoy. We investigate this problem in three cold-start scenarios: (i) cold playlists, where we recommend songs to form new personalised playlists for an existing user; (ii) cold users, where we recommend songs to form new playlists for a new user; and (iii) cold songs, where we recommend newly released songs to extend users' existing playlists. We propose a flexible multitask learning method to deal with all three settings. The method learns from user-curated playlists, and encourages songs in a playlist to be ranked h…
University of Hyderabad（海得拉巴大学）；Central University of Rajasthan（拉贾斯坦中央大学）
With the abundance of data in recent years, interesting challenges are posed in the area of recommender systems. Producing high quality recommendations with scalability and performance is the need of the hour. Singular Value Decomposition(SVD) based recommendation algorithms have been leveraged to produce better results. In this paper, we extend the SVD technique further for scalability and performance in the context of 1) multi-threading 2) multiple computational units (with the use of Graphical Processing Units) and 3) distributed computation. We propose block based matrix factorization (BMF…
Probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF) plays a crucial role in recommendation systems. It requires a large amount of user data (such as user shopping records and movie ratings) to predict personal preferences, and thereby provides users high-quality recommendation services, which expose the risk of leakage of user privacy. Differential privacy, as a provable privacy protection framework, has been applied widely to recommendation systems. It is common that different individuals have different levels of privacy requirements on items. However, traditional differential privacy can only provide a…
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；Minjiang University（闽江学院）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
The rapid growth of edge data generated by mobile devices and applications deployed at the edge of the network has exacerbated the problem of information overload. As an effective way to alleviate information overload, recommender system can improve the quality of various services by adding application data generated by users on edge devices, such as visual and textual information, on the basis of sparse rating data. The visual information in the movie trailer is a significant part of the movie recommender system. However, due to the complexity of visual information extraction, data sparsity c…
IRIT, Université de Toulouse, CNRS（图卢兹大学 IRIT 研究所、法国国家科学研究中心）
We introduce negative binomial matrix factorization (NBMF), a matrix factorization technique specially designed for analyzing over-dispersed count data. It can be viewed as an extension of Poisson matrix factorization (PF) perturbed by a multiplicative term which models exposure. This term brings a degree of freedom for controlling the dispersion, making NBMF more robust to outliers. We show that NBMF allows to skip traditional pre-processing stages, such as binarization, which lead to loss of information. Two estimation approaches are presented: maximum likelihood and variational Bayes infere…
Latent factor models (LFMs) such as matrix factorization achieve the state-of-the-art performance among various Collaborative Filtering (CF) approaches for recommendation. Despite the high recommendation accuracy of LFMs, a critical issue to be resolved is the lack of explainability. Extensive efforts have been made in the literature to incorporate explainability into LFMs. However, they either rely on auxiliary information which may not be available in practice, or fail to provide easy-to-understand explanations. In this paper, we propose a fast influence analysis method named FIA, which succ…
Kent State University（肯特州立大学）；iLambda；Auburn University（奥本大学）
Recently, linear regression models, such as EASE and SLIM, have shown to often produce rather competitive results against more sophisticated deep learning models. On the other side, the (weighted) matrix factorization approaches have been popular choices for recommendation in the past and widely adopted in the industry. In this work, we aim to theoretically understand the relationship between these two approaches, which are the cornerstones of model-based recommendations. Through the derivation and analysis of the closed-form solutions for two basic regression and matrix factorization approach…
Predicting the novel effects of drugs based on information about approved drugs can be regarded as a recommendation system. Matrix factorization is one of the most used recommendation systems and various algorithms have been devised for it. A literature survey and summary of existing algorithms for predicting drug effects demonstrated that most such methods, including neighborhood regularized logistic matrix factorization, which was the best performer in benchmark tests, used a binary matrix that considers only the presence or absence of interactions. However, drug effects are known to have tw…
Given a sparse rating matrix and an auxiliary matrix of users or items, how can we accurately predict missing ratings considering different data contexts of entities? Many previous studies proved that utilizing the additional information with rating data is helpful to improve the performance. However, existing methods are limited in that 1) they ignore the fact that data contexts of rating and auxiliary matrices are different, 2) they have restricted capability of expressing independence information of users or items, and 3) they assume the relation between a user and an item is linear. We pro…
Matrix factorization was used to generate investment recommendations for investors. An iterative conjugate gradient method was used to optimize the regularized squared-error loss function. The number of latent factors, number of iterations, and regularization values were explored. Overfitting can be addressed by either early stopping or regularization parameter tuning. The model achieved the highest average prediction accuracy of 13.3%. With a similar model, the same dataset was used to generate investor recommendations for companies undergoing fundraising, which achieved highest prediction ac…
Accelerating Matrix Factorization by Dynamic Pruning for Fast Recommendation
School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University（上海大学计算机工程与科学学院）；College of Integrated Circuits and Optoelectronic Chips, School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shenzhen Technology University（深圳科技大学集成电路与光电芯片学院、计算机工程与科学学院）
iALS is a popular algorithm for learning matrix factorization models from implicit feedback with alternating least squares. This algorithm was invented over a decade ago but still shows competitive quality compared to recent approaches like VAE, EASE, SLIM, or NCF. Due to a computational trick that avoids negative sampling, iALS is very efficient especially for large item catalogues. However, iALS does not scale well with large embedding dimensions, d, due to its cubic runtime dependency on d. Coordinate descent variations, iCD, have been proposed to lower the complexity to quadratic in d. In …
State of the art music recommender systems mainly rely on either matrix factorization-based collaborative filtering approaches or deep learning architectures. Deep learning models usually use metadata for content-based filtering or predict the next user interaction by learning from temporal sequences of user actions. Despite advances in deep learning for song recommendation, none has taken advantage of the sequential nature of songs by learning sequence models that are based on content. Aside from the importance of prediction accuracy, other significant aspects are important, such as explainab…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Recommendation models can effectively estimate underlying user interests and predict one's future behaviors by factorizing an observed user-item rating matrix into products of two sets of latent factors. However, the user-specific embedding factors can only be learned in a transductive way, making it difficult to handle new users on-the-fly. In this paper, we propose an inductive collaborative filtering framework that contains two representation models. The first model follows conventional matrix factorization which factorizes a group of key users' rating matrix to obtain meta latents. The sec…
Venue recommendation systems model the past interactions (i.e., check-ins) of the users and recommend venues. Traditional recommendation systems employ collaborative filtering, content-based filtering or matrix factorization. Recently, vector space embedding and deep learning algorithms are also used for recommendation. In this work, I propose a method for recommending top-k venues by utilizing the sequentiality feature of check-ins and a recent vector space embedding method, namely the FastText. Our proposed method; forms groups of check-ins, learns the vector space representations of the ven…
Matrix Factorization is one of the most successful recommender system techniques over the past decade. However, the classic probabilistic theory framework for matrix factorization is modeled using normal distributions. To find better probabilistic models, algorithms such as RankMat, ZeroMat and DotMat have been invented in recent years. In this paper, we model the user rating behavior in recommender system as a Poisson process, and design an algorithm that relies on no input data to solve the recommendation problem and the cold start issue at the same time. We prove the superiority of our algo…
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology（新型软件技术国家重点实验室）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）
Recommender systems (RSs) provide an effective way of alleviating the information overload problem by selecting personalized choices. Online social networks and user-generated content provide diverse sources for recommendation beyond ratings, which present opportunities as well as challenges for traditional RSs. Although social matrix factorization (Social MF) can integrate ratings with social relations and topic matrix factorization can integrate ratings with item reviews, both of them ignore some useful information. In this paper, we investigate the effective data fusion by combining the two…
In this work, we examine the security of InstaHide, a scheme recently proposed by [Huang, Song, Li and Arora, ICML'20] for preserving the security of private datasets in the context of distributed learning. To generate a synthetic training example to be shared among the distributed learners, InstaHide takes a convex combination of private feature vectors and randomly flips the sign of each entry of the resulting vector with probability 1/2. A salient question is whether this scheme is secure in any provable sense, perhaps under a plausible hardness assumption and assuming the distributions gen…
Music Structure Analysis (MSA) consists in segmenting a music piece in several distinct sections. We approach MSA within a compression framework, under the hypothesis that the structure is more easily revealed by a simplified representation of the original content of the song. More specifically, under the hypothesis that MSA is correlated with similarities occurring at the bar scale, this article introduces the use of linear and non-linear compression schemes on barwise audio signals. Compressed representations capture the most salient components of the different bars in the song and are then …
Shandong University（山东大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
User and item features of side information are crucial for accurate recommendation. However, the large number of feature dimensions, e.g., usually larger than 10^7, results in expensive storage and computational cost. This prohibits fast recommendation especially on mobile applications where the computational resource is very limited. In this paper, we develop a generic feature-based recommendation model, called Discrete Factorization Machine (DFM), for fast and accurate recommendation. DFM binarizes the real-valued model parameters (e.g., float32) of every feature embedding into binary codes …
IRIT（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Count data are often used in recommender systems: they are widespread (song play counts, product purchases, clicks on web pages) and can reveal user preference without any explicit rating from the user. Such data are known to be sparse, over-dispersed and bursty, which makes their direct use in recommender systems challenging, often leading to pre-processing steps such as binarization. The aim of this paper is to build recommender systems from these raw data, by means of the recently proposed compound Poisson Factorization (cPF). The paper contributions are three-fold: we present a unified fra…
