Recurrent neural networks with fixed time convergence for linear and quadratic programming

In this paper, a new class of recurrent neural networks which solve linear and quadratic programs are presented. Their design is considered as a sliding mode control problem, where the network structure is based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions with the KKT multipliers considered as control inputs to be implemented with fixed time stabilizing terms, instead of common used activation functions. Thus, the main feature of the proposed network is its fixed convergence time to the solution. That means, there is time independent to the initial conditions in which the network converges to the optimization solution. Simulations show the feasibility of the current approach

Predictive Accuracy of Recommender Algorithms

Recommender systems present a customized list of items based upon user or item characteristics with the objective of reducing a large number of possible choices to a smaller ranked set most likely to appeal to the user. A variety of algorithms for recommender systems have been developed and refined including applications of deep learning neural networks. Recent research reports point to a need to perform carefully controlled experiments to gain insights about the relative accuracy of different recommender algorithms, because studies evaluating different methods have not used a common set of benchmark data sets, baseline models, and evaluation metrics. The dissertation used publicly available sources of ratings data with a suite of three conventional recommender algorithms and two deep learning (DL) algorithms in controlled experiments to assess their comparative accuracy. Results for the non-DL algorithms conformed well to published results and benchmarks. The two DL algorithms did not perform as well and illuminated known challenges implementing DL recommender algorithms as reported in the literature. Model overfitting is discussed as a potential explanation for the weaker performance of the DL algorithms and several regularization strategies are reviewed as possible approaches to improve predictive error. Findings justify the need for further research in the use of deep learning models for recommender systems