The design and study of pedagogical paper recommendation

For learners engaging in senior-level courses, tutors in many cases would like to pick some articles as supplementary reading materials for them each week. Unlike researchers ‘Googling’ papers from the Internet, tutors, when making recommendations, should consider course syllabus and their assessment of learners along many dimensions. As such, simply ‘Googling’ articles from the Internet is far from enough. That is, learner models of each individual, including their learning interest, knowledge, goals, etc. should be considered when making paper recommendations, since the recommendation should be carried out so as to ensure that the suitability of a paper for a learner is calculated as the summation of the fitness of the appropriateness of it to help the learner in general. This type of the recommendation is called a Pedagogical Paper Recommender.In this thesis, we propose a set of recommendation methods for a Pedagogical Paper Recommender and study the various important issues surrounding it. Experimental studies confirm that making recommendations to learners in social learning environments is not the same as making recommendation to users in commercial environments such as Amazon.com. In such learning environments, learners are willing to accept items that are not interesting, yet meet their learning goals in some way or another; learners’ overall impression towards each paper is not solely dependent on the interestingness of the paper, but also other factors, such as the degree to which the paper can help to meet their ‘cognitive’ goals.It is also observed that most of the recommendation methods are scalable. Although the degree of this scalability is still unclear, we conjecture that those methods are consistent to up to 50 papers in terms of recommendation accuracy. The experiments conducted so far and suggestions made on the adoption of recommendation methods are based on the data we have collected during one semester of a course. Therefore, the generality of results needs to undergo further validation before more certain conclusion can be drawn. These follow up studies should be performed (ideally) in more semesters on the same course or related courses with more newly added papers. Then, some open issues can be further investigated. Despite these weaknesses, this study has been able to reach the research goals set out in the proposed pedagogical paper recommender which, although sounding intuitive, unfortunately has been largely ignored in the research community. Finding a ‘good’ paper is not trivial: it is not about the simple fact that the user will either accept the recommended items, or not; rather, it is a multiple step process that typically entails the users navigating the paper collections, understanding the recommended items, seeing what others like/dislike, and making decisions. Therefore, a future research goal to proceed from the study here is to design for different kinds of social navigation in order to study their respective impacts on user behavior, and how over time, user behavior feeds back to influence the system performance

Collaborative-demographic hybrid for financial: product recommendation

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsDue to the increased availability of mature data mining and analysis technologies supporting CRM processes, several financial institutions are striving to leverage customer data and integrate insights regarding customer behaviour, needs, and preferences into their marketing approach. As decision support systems assisting marketing and commercial efforts, Recommender Systems applied to the financial domain have been gaining increased attention. This thesis studies a Collaborative- Demographic Hybrid Recommendation System, applied to the financial services sector, based on real data provided by a Portuguese private commercial bank. This work establishes a framework to support account managers’ advice on which financial product is most suitable for each of the bank’s corporate clients. The recommendation problem is further developed by conducting a performance comparison for both multi-output regression and multiclass classification prediction approaches. Experimental results indicate that multiclass architectures are better suited for the prediction task, outperforming alternative multi-output regression models on the evaluation metrics considered. Withal, multiclass Feed-Forward Neural Networks, combined with Recursive Feature Elimination, is identified as the topperforming algorithm, yielding a 10-fold cross-validated F1 Measure of 83.16%, and achieving corresponding values of Precision and Recall of 84.34%, and 85.29%, respectively. Overall, this study provides important contributions for positioning the bank’s commercial efforts around customers’ future requirements. By allowing for a better understanding of customers’ needs and preferences, the proposed Recommender allows for more personalized and targeted marketing contacts, leading to higher conversion rates, corporate profitability, and customer satisfaction and loyalty

Combining Coauthorship Network and Content for Literature Recommendation

This paper studies literature recommendation approaches using both content features and coauthorship relations of articles in literature databases. Most literature databases allow data access (via site subscription) without having to identify users, and thus task-focused recommendation is more appropriate in this context. Previous work mostly utilizes content and usage log for making task-focused recommendation. More recent works start to incorporate coauthorship network for recommendation and found it beneficial when the specified articles preferred by authors are similar in their content. However, it was also found that recommendation based on content features achieves better performance under other circumstances. Therefore, in this work we propose to incorporate both content and coauthorship network in making task-focused recommendation. Three hybrid methods, namely switching, proportional, and fusion are developed and compared. Our experimental results show that in general the proposed hybrid approach achieves better performance than approaches that utilize only one source of knowledge. In particular, the fusion method tends to have higher recommendation accuracy for articles of higher ranks. Besides, the content-based approach is more likely to recommend articles of low fidelity, whereas the coauthorship network-based approach has the least chance