Learning informative representations of users and items from the interaction data is of crucial importance to collaborative filtering (CF). Present embedding functions exploit user-item relationships to enrich the representations, evolving from a single user-item instance to the holistic interaction graph. Nevertheless, they largely model the relationships in a uniform manner, while neglecting the diversity of user intents on adopting the items, which could be to pass time, for interest, or shopping for others like families. Such uniform approach to model user interests easily results in suboptimal representations, failing to model diverse relationships and disentangle user intents in representations.
In this work, we pay special attention to user-item relationships at the finer granularity of user intents. We hence devise a new model, Disentangled Graph Collaborative Filtering (DGCF), to disentangle these factors and yield disentangled representations. Specifically, by modeling a distribution over intents for each user-item interaction, we iteratively refine the intent-aware interaction graphs and representations. Meanwhile, we encourage independence of different intents. This leads to disentangled representations, effectively distilling information pertinent to each intent. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, and DGCF achieves significant improvements over several state-of-the-art models like NGCF, DisenGCN, and MacridVAE. Further analyses offer insights into the advantages of DGCF on the disentanglement of user intents and interpretability of representations. Our codes are available in https://github.com/xiangwang1223/disentangled_graph_collaborative_filtering.
Preference or Intent? Double Disentangled Collaborative Filtering
HKUST Fok Ying Tung Research Institute（香港科技大学霍英东研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；BOSS Zhipin（BOSS直聘）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
IRIDIA（IRIDIA实验室）；Université Libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）
We show that collaborative filtering can be viewed as a sequence prediction problem, and that given this interpretation, recurrent neural networks offer very competitive approach. In particular we study how the long short-term memory (LSTM) can be applied to collaborative filtering, and how it compares to standard nearest neighbors and matrix factorization methods on movie recommendation. We show that the LSTM is competitive in all aspects, and largely outperforms other methods in terms of item coverage and short term predictions.
Among various recommender techniques, collaborative filtering (CF) is the most successful one. And a key problem in CF is how to represent users and items. Previous works usually represent a user (an item) as a vector of latent factors (aka. \textit{embedding}) and then model the interactions between users and items based on the representations. Despite its effectiveness, we argue that it's insufficient to yield satisfactory embeddings for collaborative filtering. Inspired by the idea of SVD++ that represents users based on themselves and their interacted items, we propose a general collaborat…
Automatic solutions which enable the selection of the best algorithms for a new problem are commonly found in the literature. One research area which has recently received considerable efforts is Collaborative Filtering. Existing work includes several approaches using Metalearning, which relate the characteristics of datasets with the performance of the algorithms. This work explores an alternative approach to tackle this problem. Since, in essence, both are recommendation problems, this work uses Collaborative Filtering algorithms to select Collaborative Filtering algorithms. Our approach int…
Collaborative filtering tries to predict the ratings of a user over some items based on opinions of other users with similar taste. The ratings are usually given in the form of a sparse matrix, the goal being to find the missing entries (i.e. ratings). Various approaches to collaborative filtering exist, some of the most popular ones being the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and K-means clustering. One of the challenges in the SVD approach is finding a good initialization of the unknown ratings. A possible initialization is suggested by [1]. In this paper we explain how K-means approach can…
In this paper we examine the effect of applying ensemble learning to the performance of collaborative filtering methods. We present several systematic approaches for generating an ensemble of collaborative filtering models based on a single collaborative filtering algorithm (single-model or homogeneous ensemble). We present an adaptation of several popular ensemble techniques in machine learning for the collaborative filtering domain, including bagging, boosting, fusion and randomness injection. We evaluate the proposed approach on several types of collaborative filtering base models: k- NN, m…
The recent work by Rendle et al. (2020), based on empirical observations, argues that matrix-factorization collaborative filtering (MCF) compares favorably to neural collaborative filtering (NCF), and conjectures the dot product's superiority over the feed-forward neural network as similarity function. In this paper, we address the comparison rigorously by answering the following questions: 1. what is the limiting expressivity of each model; 2. under the practical gradient descent, to which solution does each optimization path converge; 3. how would the models generalize under the inductive an…
Within the task of collaborative filtering two challenges for computing conditional probabilities exist. First, the amount of training data available is typically sparse with respect to the size of the domain. Thus, support for higher-order interactions is generally not present. Second, the variables that we are conditioning upon vary for each query. That is, users label different variables during each query. For this reason, there is no consistent input to output mapping. To address these problems we purpose a maximum entropy approach using a non-standard measure of entropy. This approach can…
ADRNet: A Generalized Collaborative Filtering Framework Combining Clinical and Non-Clinical Data for Adverse Drug Reaction Prediction
Peking University（北京大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Content-based and collaborative filtering methods are the most successful solutions in recommender systems. Content based method is based on items attributes. This method checks the features of users favourite items and then proposes the items which have the most similar characteristics with those items. Collaborative filtering method is based on the determination of similar items or similar users, which are called item-based and user-based collaborative filtering, respectively.In this paper we propose a hybrid method that integrates collaborative filtering and content-based methods. The propo…
Latent factor models have been used widely in collaborative filtering based recommender systems. In recent years, deep learning has been successful in solving a wide variety of machine learning problems. Motivated by the success of deep learning, we propose a deeper version of latent factor model. Experiments on benchmark datasets shows that our proposed technique significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art collaborative filtering techniques.
Recommendation system is important to a content sharing/creating social network. Collaborative filtering is a widely-adopted technology in conventional recommenders, which is based on similarity between positively engaged content items involving the same users. Conventional collaborative filtering (CCF) suffers from cold start problem and narrow content diversity. We propose a new recommendation approach, heterogeneous collaborative filtering (HCF) to tackle these challenges at the root, while keeping the strength of collaborative filtering. We present two implementation algorithms of HCF for …
Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；IBM Research - China（IBM中国研究院）
In collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms, the optimal models are usually learned by globally minimizing the empirical risks averaged over all the observed data. However, the global models are often obtained via a performance tradeoff among users/items, i.e., not all users/items are perfectly fitted by the global models due to the hard non-convex optimization problems in CF algorithms. Ensemble learning can address this issue by learning multiple diverse models but usually suffer from efficiency issue on large datasets or complex algorithms. In this paper, we keep the intermediate models obta…
EtsTur İstanbul（EtsTur 伊斯坦布尔）；Bilgisayar ve Bilişim Fakültesi İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi（伊斯坦布尔理工大学计算机与信息学院）；Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü Koç Üniversitesi（科奇大学计算机工程系）
Nowadays, people start to use online reservation systems to plan their vacations since they have vast amount of choices available. Selecting when and where to go from this large-scale options is getting harder. In addition, sometimes consumers can miss the better options due to the wealth of information to be found on the online reservation systems. In this sense, personalized services such as recommender systems play a crucial role in decision making. Two traditional recommendation techniques are content-based and collaborative filtering. While both methods have their advantages, they also ha…
Collaborative filtering is an effective recommendation technique wherein the preference of an individual can potentially be predicted based on preferences of other members. Early algorithms often relied on the strong locality in the preference data, that is, it is enough to predict preference of a user on a particular item based on a small subset of other users with similar tastes or of other items with similar properties. More recently, dimensionality reduction techniques have proved to be equally competitive, and these are based on the co-occurrence patterns rather than locality. This paper …
Recommendation and collaborative filtering systems are important in modern information and e-commerce applications. As these systems are becoming increasingly popular in the industry, their outputs could affect business decision making, introducing incentives for an adversarial party to compromise the availability or integrity of such systems. We introduce a data poisoning attack on collaborative filtering systems. We demonstrate how a powerful attacker with full knowledge of the learner can generate malicious data so as to maximize his/her malicious objectives, while at the same time mimickin…
Matrix factorization is one of the best approaches for collaborative filtering, because of its high accuracy in presenting users and items latent factors. The main disadvantages of matrix factorization are its complexity, and being very hard to be parallelized, specially with very large matrices. In this paper, we introduce a new method for collaborative filtering based on Matrix Factorization by combining simulated annealing with levy distribution. By using this method, good solutions are achieved in acceptable time with low computations, compared to other methods like stochastic gradient des…
Collaborative filtering is the process of making recommendations regarding the potential preference of a user, for example shopping on the Internet, based on the preference ratings of the user and a number of other users for various items. This paper considers collaborative filtering based on explicitmulti-valued ratings. To evaluate the algorithms, weconsider only {em pure} collaborative filtering, using ratings exclusively, and no other information about the people or items.Our approach is to predict a user's preferences regarding a particularitem by using other people who rated that item an…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Amazon Inc.（亚马逊公司）
This paper proposes Quaternion Collaborative Filtering (QCF), a novel representation learning method for recommendation. Our proposed QCF relies on and exploits computation with Quaternion algebra, benefiting from the expressiveness and rich representation learning capability of Hamilton products. Quaternion representations, based on hypercomplex numbers, enable rich inter-latent dependencies between imaginary components. This encourages intricate relations to be captured when learning user-item interactions, serving as a strong inductive bias as compared with the real-space inner product. All…
Neural network-based collaborative filtering systems focus on designing network architectures to learn better representations while fixing the input to the user/item interaction vectors and/or ID. In this paper, we first show that the non-zero elements of the inputs are learnable parameters that determine the weights in combining the user/item embeddings, and fixing them limits the power of the models in learning the representations. Then, we propose to learn the value of the non-zero elements of the inputs jointly with the neural network parameters. We analyze the model complexity and the emp…
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩郡分校）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
A growing proportion of human interactions are digitized on social media platforms and subjected to algorithmic decision-making, and it has become increasingly important to ensure fair treatment from these algorithms. In this work, we investigate gender bias in collaborative-filtering recommender systems trained on social media data. We develop neural fair collaborative filtering (NFCF), a practical framework for mitigating gender bias in recommending sensitive items (e.g. jobs, academic concentrations, or courses of study) using a pre-training and fine-tuning approach to neural collaborative …
Recommendation Systems (SR) suggest items exploring user preferences, helping them with the information overload problem. Two approaches to SR have received more prominence, Collaborative Filtering, and Content-Based Filtering. Moreover, even though studies are indicating their advantages and disadvantages, few results empirically prove their characteristics, similarities, and differences. In this work, an experimental methodology is proposed to perform comparisons between recommendation algorithms for different approaches going beyond the "precision of the predictions". For the experiments, t…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为云计算技术有限公司）
Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) has been extended as a representative nonlinear method for collaborative filtering. However, the bottleneck of VAE lies in the softmax computation over all items, such that it takes linear costs in the number of items to compute the loss and gradient for optimization. This hinders the practical use due to millions of items in real-world scenarios. Importance sampling is an effective approximation method, based on which the sampled softmax has been derived. However, existing methods usually exploit the uniform or popularity sampler as proposal distributions, leadin…
In this paper, we apply a mini-batch based negative sampling method to efficiently train a latent factor autoencoder model on large scale and sparse data for implicit feedback collaborative filtering. We compare our work against a state-of-the-art baseline model on different experimental datasets and show that this method can lead to a good and fast approximation of the baseline model performance. The source code is available in https://github.com/amoussawi/recoder .
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术学院）；AI Research Institute（人工智能研究院）
Conventional collaborative filtering techniques don't take into consideration the effect of discrepancy in users' rating perception. Some users may rarely give 5 stars to items while others almost always assign 5 stars to the chosen item. Even if they had experience with the same items this systematic discrepancy in their evaluation style will lead to the systematic errors in the ability of recommender system to effectively extract right patterns from data. To mitigate this problem we introduce the ratings' similarity matrix which represents the dependency between different values of ratings o…
Siemens Corporate Technology（西门子企业技术）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based filtering (CBF) have widely been used in information filtering applications. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses which is why researchers have developed hybrid systems. This paper proposes a novel approach to unify CF and CBF in a probabilistic framework, named collaborative ensemble learning. It uses probabilistic SVMs to model each user's profile (as CBF does).At the prediction phase, it combines a society OF users profiles, represented by their respective SVM models, to predict an active users preferences(the CF idea).The combin…
The possibility of employing restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) for collaborative filtering has been known for about a decade. However, there has been hardly any work on this topic since 2007. This work revisits the application of RBM in recommender systems. RBM based collaborative filtering only used the rating information; this is an unsupervised architecture. This work adds supervision by exploiting user demographic information and item metadata. A network is learned from the representation layer to the labels (metadata). The proposed label consistent RBM formulation improves significantly …
Collaborative filtering is amongst the most preferred techniques when implementing recommender systems. Recently, great interest has turned towards parallel and distributed implementations of collaborative filtering algorithms. This work is a survey of the parallel and distributed collaborative filtering implementations, aiming not only to provide a comprehensive presentation of the field's development, but also to offer future research orientation by highlighting the issues that need to be further developed.
In today's day and age when almost every industry has an online presence with users interacting in online marketplaces, personalized recommendations have become quite important. Traditionally, the problem of collaborative filtering has been tackled using Matrix Factorization which is linear in nature. We extend the work of [11] on using variational autoencoders (VAEs) for collaborative filtering with implicit feedback by proposing a hybrid, multi-modal approach. Our approach combines movie embeddings (learned from a sibling VAE network) with user ratings from the Movielens 20M dataset and appl…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
In this dissertation, we cover some recent advances in collaborative filtering and ranking. In chapter 1, we give a brief introduction of the history and the current landscape of collaborative filtering and ranking; chapter 2 we first talk about pointwise collaborative filtering problem with graph information, and how our proposed new method can encode very deep graph information which helps four existing graph collaborative filtering algorithms; chapter 3 is on the pairwise approach for collaborative ranking and how we speed up the algorithm to near-linear time complexity; chapter 4 is on the…
One of the most used approaches for providing recommendations in various online environments such as e-commerce is collaborative filtering. Although, this is a simple method for recommending items or services, accuracy and quality problems still exist. Thus, we propose a dynamic multi-level collaborative filtering method that improves the quality of the recommendations. The proposed method is based on positive and negative adjustments and can be used in different domains that utilize collaborative filtering to increase the quality of the user experience. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the p…
Knowledge graph (KG) based Collaborative Filtering is an effective approach to personalizing recommendation systems for relatively static domains such as movies and books, by leveraging structured information from KG to enrich both item and user representations. Motivated by the use of Transformers for understanding rich text in content-based filtering recommender systems, we propose Content-aware KG-enhanced Meta-preference Networks as a way to enhance collaborative filtering recommendation based on both structured information from KG as well as unstructured content features based on Transfor…
Increased public interest in healthy lifestyles has motivated the study of algorithms that encourage people to follow a healthy diet. Applying collaborative filtering to build recommendation systems in domains where only implicit feedback is available is also a rapidly growing research area. In this report we combine these two trends by developing a recommendation system to suggest ingredients that can be added to a partial recipe. We implement the item-based collaborative filtering algorithm using a high-dimensional, sparse dataset of recipes, which inherently contains only implicit feedback.…
Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；University of Missouri-Columbia（密苏里大学哥伦比亚分校）；Applied Computational Intelligence Laboratory, Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学应用计算智能实验室）
Collaborative filtering recommendation systems provide recommendations to users based on their own past preferences, as well as those of other users who share similar interests. The use of recommendation systems has grown widely in recent years, helping people choose which movies to watch, books to read, and items to buy. However, users are often concerned about their privacy when using such systems, and many users are reluctant to provide accurate information to most online services. Privacy-preserving collaborative filtering recommendation systems aim to provide users with accurate recommend…
In this paper, we propose a very concise deep learning approach for collaborative filtering that jointly models distributional representation for users and items. The proposed framework obtains better performance when compared against current state-of-art algorithms and that made the distributional representation model a promising direction for further research in the collaborative filtering.
We study fairness in collaborative-filtering recommender systems, which are sensitive to discrimination that exists in historical data. Biased data can lead collaborative-filtering methods to make unfair predictions for users from minority groups. We identify the insufficiency of existing fairness metrics and propose four new metrics that address different forms of unfairness. These fairness metrics can be optimized by adding fairness terms to the learning objective. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that our new metrics can better measure fairness than the baseline, and that the fai…
E-Learning systems (ELS) and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) play a significant part in today's education programs. Sequencing questions is the art of generating a personalized quiz for a target learner. A personalized test will enrich the learner's experience and will contribute to a more effective and efficient learning process. In this paper, we used the Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF) model to generate question sequencing and compare it to a pair-wise memory-based question sequencing algorithm - EduRank. The NCF model showed significantly better ranking results than the EduRank mod…
Matrix factorization (MF) is a common method for collaborative filtering. MF represents user preferences and item attributes by latent factors. Despite that MF is a powerful method, it suffers from not be able to identifying strong associations of closely related items. In this work, we propose a method for matrix factorization that can reflect the localized relationships between strong related items into the latent representations of items. We do it by combine two worlds: MF for collaborative filtering and item2vec for item-embedding. The proposed method is able to exploit item-item relations…
In this paper, several Collaborative Filtering (CF) approaches with latent variable methods were studied using user-item interactions to capture important hidden variations of the sparse customer purchasing behaviours. The latent factors are used to generalize the purchasing pattern of the customers and to provide product recommendations. CF with Neural Collaborative Filtering(NCF) was shown to produce the highest Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) performance on the real-world proprietary dataset provided by a large parts supply company. Different hyperparameters were tested using B…
The increasing availability of implicit feedback datasets has raised the interest in developing effective collaborative filtering techniques able to deal asymmetrically with unambiguous positive feedback and ambiguous negative feedback. In this paper, we propose a principled kernel-based collaborative filtering method for top-N item recommendation with implicit feedback. We present an efficient implementation using the linear kernel, and we show how to generalize it to kernels of the dot product family preserving the efficiency. We also investigate on the elements which influence the sparsity …
Deep learning provides accurate collaborative filtering models to improve recommender system results. Deep matrix factorization and their related collaborative neural networks are the state-of-art in the field; nevertheless, both models lack the necessary stochasticity to create the robust, continuous, and structured latent spaces that variational autoencoders exhibit. On the other hand, data augmentation through variational autoencoder does not provide accurate results in the collaborative filtering field due to the high sparsity of recommender systems. Our proposed models apply the variation…
In this paper, we model the dependencies among the items that are recommended to a user in a collaborative-filtering problem via a Gaussian Markov Random Field (MRF). We build upon Besag's auto-normal parameterization and pseudo-likelihood, which not only enables computationally efficient learning, but also connects the areas of MRFs and sparse inverse covariance estimation with autoencoders and neighborhood models, two successful approaches in collaborative filtering. We propose a novel approximation for learning sparse MRFs, where the trade-off between recommendation-accuracy and training-ti…
Center for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics（模式识别与数据分析中心）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Recommender systems play a central role in providing individualized access to information and services. This paper focuses on collaborative filtering, an approach that exploits the shared structure among mind-liked users and similar items. In particular, we focus on a formal probabilistic framework known as Markov random fields (MRF). We address the open problem of structure learning and introduce a sparsity-inducing algorithm to automatically estimate the interaction structures between users and between items. Item-item and user-user correlation networks are obtained as a by-product. Large-sc…
Collaborative filtering is a rapidly advancing research area. Every year several new techniques are proposed and yet it is not clear which of the techniques work best and under what conditions. In this paper we conduct a study comparing several collaborative filtering techniques -- both classic and recent state-of-the-art -- in a variety of experimental contexts. Specifically, we report conclusions controlling for number of items, number of users, sparsity level, performance criteria, and computational complexity. Our conclusions identify what algorithms work well and in what conditions, and c…
Recommender systems are a long-standing research problem in data mining and machine learning. They are incremental in nature, as new user-item interaction logs arrive. In real-world applications, we need to periodically train a collaborative filtering algorithm to extract user/item embedding vectors and therefore, a time-series of embedding vectors can be naturally defined. We present a time-series forecasting-based upgrade kit (TimeKit), which works in the following way: it i) first decides a base collaborative filtering algorithm, ii) extracts user/item embedding vectors with the base algori…
Introducing consumed items as users' implicit feedback in matrix factorization (MF) method, SVD++ is one of the most effective collaborative filtering methods for personalized recommender systems. Though powerful, SVD++ has two limitations: (i). only user-side implicit feedback is utilized, whereas item-side implicit feedback, which can also enrich item representations, is not leveraged;(ii). in SVD++, the interacted items are equally weighted when combining the implicit feedback, which can not reflect user's true preferences accurately. To tackle the above limitations, in this paper we propos…
