5,371 research outputs found
A Collective Variational Autoencoder for Top- Recommendation with Side Information
Recommender systems have been studied extensively due to their practical use
in many real-world scenarios. Despite this, generating effective
recommendations with sparse user ratings remains a challenge. Side information
associated with items has been widely utilized to address rating sparsity.
Existing recommendation models that use side information are linear and, hence,
have restricted expressiveness. Deep learning has been used to capture
non-linearities by learning deep item representations from side information but
as side information is high-dimensional existing deep models tend to have large
input dimensionality, which dominates their overall size. This makes them
difficult to train, especially with small numbers of inputs.
Rather than learning item representations, which is problematic with
high-dimensional side information, in this paper, we propose to learn feature
representation through deep learning from side information. Learning feature
representations, on the other hand, ensures a sufficient number of inputs to
train a deep network. To achieve this, we propose to simultaneously recover
user ratings and side information, by using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE).
Specifically, user ratings and side information are encoded and decoded
collectively through the same inference network and generation network. This is
possible as both user ratings and side information are data associated with
items. To account for the heterogeneity of user rating and side information,
the final layer of the generation network follows different distributions
depending on the type of information. The proposed model is easy to implement
and efficient to optimize and is shown to outperform state-of-the-art top-
recommendation methods that use side information.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, DLRS workshop 201
Recurrent Latent Variable Networks for Session-Based Recommendation
In this work, we attempt to ameliorate the impact of data sparsity in the
context of session-based recommendation. Specifically, we seek to devise a
machine learning mechanism capable of extracting subtle and complex underlying
temporal dynamics in the observed session data, so as to inform the
recommendation algorithm. To this end, we improve upon systems that utilize
deep learning techniques with recurrently connected units; we do so by adopting
concepts from the field of Bayesian statistics, namely variational inference.
Our proposed approach consists in treating the network recurrent units as
stochastic latent variables with a prior distribution imposed over them. On
this basis, we proceed to infer corresponding posteriors; these can be used for
prediction and recommendation generation, in a way that accounts for the
uncertainty in the available sparse training data. To allow for our approach to
easily scale to large real-world datasets, we perform inference under an
approximate amortized variational inference (AVI) setup, whereby the learned
posteriors are parameterized via (conventional) neural networks. We perform an
extensive experimental evaluation of our approach using challenging benchmark
datasets, and illustrate its superiority over existing state-of-the-art
techniques
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