Many Deep Learning approaches solve complicated classification and regression problems by hierarchically constructing complex features from the raw input data. Although a few works have investigated the application of deep neural networks in recommendation domain, they mostly extract entity features by exploiting unstructured auxiliary data such as visual and textual information, and when it comes to using user-item rating matrix, feature extraction is done by using matrix factorization. As matrix factorization has some limitations, some works have been done to replace it with deep neural network. but these works either need to exploit unstructured data such item's reviews or images, or are specially designed to use implicit data and don't take user-item rating matrix into account. In this paper, we investigate the usage of novel representation learning algorithms to extract users and items representations from rating matrix, and offer a deep neural network for Collaborative Filtering. Our proposed approach is a modular algorithm consisted of two main phases: REpresentation eXtraction and a deep neural NETwork (RexNet). Using two joint and parallel neural networks in RexNet enables it to extract a hierarchy of features for each entity in order to predict the degree of interest of users to items. The resulted predictions are then used for the final recommendation. Unlike other deep learning recommendation approaches, RexNet is not dependent to unstructured auxiliary data such as visual and textual information, instead, it uses only the user-item rate matrix as its input. We evaluated RexNet in an extensive set of experiments against state of the art recommendation methods. The results show that RexNet significantly outperforms the baseline algorithms in a variety of data sets with different degrees of density.
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.
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…
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）
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…
Autoencoders are a common building block of Deep Learning architectures, where they are mainly used for representation learning. They have also been successfully used in Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender systems to predict missing ratings. Unfortunately, like all black box machine learning models, they are unable to explain their outputs. Hence, while predictions from an Autoencoder-based recommender system might be accurate, it might not be clear to the user why a recommendation was generated. In this work, we design an explainable recommendation system using an Autoencoder model whose…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Learning vector representations (aka. embeddings) of users and items lies at the core of modern recommender systems. Ranging from early matrix factorization to recently emerged deep learning based methods, existing efforts typically obtain a user's (or an item's) embedding by mapping from pre-existing features that describe the user (or the item), such as ID and attributes. We argue that an inherent drawback of such methods is that, the collaborative signal, which is latent in user-item interactions, is not encoded in the embedding process. As such, the resultant embeddings may not be sufficie…
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…
This paper describes the solution method taken by LeBuSiShu team for track1 in ACM KDD CUP 2011 contest (resulting in the 5th place). We identified two main challenges: the unique item taxonomy characteristics as well as the large data set size.To handle the item taxonomy, we present a novel method called Matrix Factorization Item Taxonomy Regularization (MFITR). MFITR obtained the 2nd best prediction result out of more then ten implemented algorithms. For rapidly computing multiple solutions of various algorithms, we have implemented an open source parallel collaborative filtering library on …
Model-based collaborative filtering analyzes user-item interactions to infer latent factors that represent user preferences and item characteristics in order to predict future interactions. Most collaborative filtering algorithms assume that these latent factors are static, although it has been shown that user preferences and item perceptions drift over time. In this paper, we propose a conjugate and numerically stable dynamic matrix factorization (DCPF) based on compound Poisson matrix factorization that models the smoothly drifting latent factors using Gamma-Markov chains. We propose a numer…
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…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Influenced by the great success of deep learning in computer vision and language understanding, research in recommendation has shifted to inventing new recommender models based on neural networks. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing neural recommender models, which generalize and surpass traditional recommender models owing to the strong representation power of neural networks. In this survey paper, we conduct a systematic review on neural recommender models from the perspective of recommendation modeling with the accuracy goal, aiming to summarize this field …
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Sequential recommendation task aims to predict user preference over items in the future given user historical behaviors. The order of user behaviors implies that there are resourceful sequential patterns embedded in the behavior history which reveal the underlying dynamics of user interests. Various sequential recommendation methods are proposed to model the dynamic user behaviors. However, most of the models only consider the user's own behaviors and dynamics, while ignoring the collaborative relations among users and items, i.e., similar tastes of users or analogous properties of items. With…
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…
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…
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.
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）
Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an indispensable functionality in Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) due to its effectiveness in helping people decide the next POI to visit. However, accurate recommendation requires a vast amount of historical check-in data, thus threatening user privacy as the location-sensitive data needs to be handled by cloud servers. Although there have been several on-device frameworks for privacy-preserving POI recommendations, they are still resource-intensive when it comes to storage and computation, and show limited robustness to the high s…
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…
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…
In this paper, we present a novel structure, Semi-AutoEncoder, based on AutoEncoder. We generalize it into a hybrid collaborative filtering model for rating prediction as well as personalized top-n recommendations. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate its state-of-the-art performances.
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…
Recently, collaborative tagging systems have attracted more and more attention and have been widely applied in web systems. Tags provide highly abstracted information about personal preferences and item content, and are therefore potential to help in improving better personalized recommendations. In this paper, we propose a tag-based recommendation algorithm considering the personal vocabulary and evaluate it in a real-world dataset: Del.icio.us. Experimental results demonstrate that the usage of tag information can significantly improve the accuracy of personalized recommendations.
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 .
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 one of the most used approaches for providing recommendations in various online environments. Even though collaborative recommendation methods have been widely utilized due to their simplicity and ease of use, accuracy is still an issue. In this paper we propose a multi-level recommendation method with its main purpose being to assist users in decision making by providing recommendations of better quality. The proposed method can be applied in different online domains that use collaborative recommender systems, thus improving the overall user experience. The efficien…
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…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；DePaul University（德保罗大学）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）
Research on fairness in machine learning has been recently extended to recommender systems. One of the factors that may impact fairness is bias disparity, the degree to which a group's preferences on various item categories fail to be reflected in the recommendations they receive. In some cases biases in the original data may be amplified or reversed by the underlying recommendation algorithm. In this paper, we explore how different recommendation algorithms reflect the tradeoff between ranking quality and bias disparity. Our experiments include neighborhood-based, model-based, and trust-aware…
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…
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…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Recommendation systems underpin the serving of nearly all online content in the modern age. From Youtube and Netflix recommendations, to Facebook feeds and Google searches, these systems are designed to filter content to the predicted preferences of users. Recently, these systems have faced growing criticism with respect to their impact on content diversity, social polarization, and the health of public discourse. In this work we simulate the recommendations given by collaborative filtering algorithms on users in the MovieLens data set. We find that prolonged exposure to system-generated recom…
Learning accurate users and news representations is critical for news recommendation. Despite great progress, existing methods seem to have a strong bias towards content representation or just capture collaborative filtering relationship. However, these approaches may suffer from the data sparsity problem (user-news interactive behavior sparsity problem) or maybe affected more by news (or user) with high popularity. In this paper, to address such limitations, we propose content filtering enriched GNN framework for news recommendation, ConFRec in short. It is compatible with existing GNN-based …
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…
The cold-start problem is a long-standing challenge in recommender systems. As a promising solution, content-based generative models usually project a cold-start item's content onto a warm-start item embedding to capture collaborative signals from item content so that collaborative filtering can be applied. However, since the training of the cold-start recommendation models is conducted on warm datasets, the existent methods face the issue that the collaborative embeddings of items will be blurred, which significantly degenerates the performance of cold-start item recommendation. To address th…
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…
