Boosting Item-based Collaborative Filtering via Nearly Uncoupled Random Walks

Item-based models are among the most popular collaborative filtering approaches for building recommender systems. Random walks can provide a powerful tool for harvesting the rich network of interactions captured within these models. They can exploit indirect relations between the items, mitigate the effects of sparsity, ensure wider itemspace coverage, as well as increase the diversity of recommendation lists. Their potential, however, can be hindered by the tendency of the walks to rapidly concentrate towards the central nodes of the graph, thereby significantly restricting the range of K-step distributions that can be exploited for personalized recommendations. In this work we introduce RecWalk; a novel random walk-based method that leverages the spectral properties of nearly uncoupled Markov chains to provably lift this limitation and prolong the influence of users' past preferences on the successive steps of the walk---allowing the walker to explore the underlying network more fruitfully. A comprehensive set of experiments on real-world datasets verify the theoretically predicted properties of the proposed approach and indicate that they are directly linked to significant improvements in top-n recommendation accuracy. They also highlight RecWalk's potential in providing a framework for boosting the performance of item-based models. RecWalk achieves state-of-the-art top-n recommendation quality outperforming several competing approaches, including recently proposed methods that rely on deep neural networks.Comment: 26 pages, complete version of the RecWalk conference paper that appeared in ACM WSDM 201

LLFR: A Lanczos-Based Latent Factor Recommender for Big Data Scenarios

The purpose if this master's thesis is to study and develop a new algorithmic framework for Collaborative Filtering to produce recommendations in the top-N recommendation problem. Thus, we propose Lanczos Latent Factor Recommender (LLFR); a novel "big data friendly" collaborative filtering algorithm for top-N recommendation. Using a computationally efficient Lanczos-based procedure, LLFR builds a low dimensional item similarity model, that can be readily exploited to produce personalized ranking vectors over the item space. A number of experiments on real datasets indicate that LLFR outperforms other state-of-the-art top-N recommendation methods from a computational as well as a qualitative perspective. Our experimental results also show that its relative performance gains, compared to competing methods, increase as the data get sparser, as in the Cold Start Problem. More specifically, this is true both when the sparsity is generalized - as in the New Community Problem, a very common problem faced by real recommender systems in their beginning stages, when there is not sufficient number of ratings for the collaborative filtering algorithms to uncover similarities between items or users - and in the very interesting case where the sparsity is localized in a small fraction of the dataset - as in the New Users Problem, where new users are introduced to the system, they have not rated many items and thus, the CF algorithm can not make reliable personalized recommendations yet.Comment: 65 pages, MSc Thesis (in Greek

Exploiting Hierarchy for Ranking-based Recommendation

The purpose of this master's thesis is to study and develop a new algorithmic framework for collaborative filtering (CF) to generate recommendations. The method we propose is based on the exploitation of the hierarchical structure of the item space and intuitively "stands" on the property of Near Complete Decomposability (NCD) which is inherent in the structure of the majority of hierarchical systems. Building on the intuition behind the NCDawareRank algorithm and its related concept of NCD proximity, we model our system in a way that illuminates its endemic characteristics and we propose a new algorithmic framework for recommendations, called HIR. We focus on combining the direct with the NCD "neighborhoods" of items to achieve better characterization of the inter-item relations, in order to improve the quality of recommendations and alleviate sparsity related problems.Comment: 81 pages, M.Sc. Thesis (in Greek), Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patra