44,696 research outputs found
Recommender Systems
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity
of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information.
Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of
communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and
interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical
achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking,
which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments
in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and
evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future
developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to
illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and
future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great
scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of
interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports
Intelligent Product Brokering for E-Commerce: An Incremental Approach to Unaccounted Attribute Detection
This research concentrates on designing generic product-brokering agent to understand user preference towards a product category and recommends a list of products to the user according to the preference captured by the agent. The proposed solution is able to detect both quantifiable and non-quantifiable attributes through a user feedback system. Unlike previous approaches, this research allows the detection of unaccounted attributes that are not within the ontology of the system. No tedious change of the algorithm, database, or ontology is required when a new product attribute is introduced. This approach only requires the attribute to be within the description field of the product. The system analyzes the general product descriptions field and creates a list of candidate attributes affecting the user’s preference. A genetic algorithm verifies these candidate attributes and excess attributes are identified and filtered off. A prototype has been created and our results show positive results in the detection of unaccounted attributes affecting a user
How Algorithmic Confounding in Recommendation Systems Increases Homogeneity and Decreases Utility
Recommendation systems are ubiquitous and impact many domains; they have the
potential to influence product consumption, individuals' perceptions of the
world, and life-altering decisions. These systems are often evaluated or
trained with data from users already exposed to algorithmic recommendations;
this creates a pernicious feedback loop. Using simulations, we demonstrate how
using data confounded in this way homogenizes user behavior without increasing
utility
Sequential Recommendation with Self-Attentive Multi-Adversarial Network
Recently, deep learning has made significant progress in the task of
sequential recommendation. Existing neural sequential recommenders typically
adopt a generative way trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). When
context information (called factor) is involved, it is difficult to analyze
when and how each individual factor would affect the final recommendation
performance. For this purpose, we take a new perspective and introduce
adversarial learning to sequential recommendation. In this paper, we present a
Multi-Factor Generative Adversarial Network (MFGAN) for explicitly modeling the
effect of context information on sequential recommendation. Specifically, our
proposed MFGAN has two kinds of modules: a Transformer-based generator taking
user behavior sequences as input to recommend the possible next items, and
multiple factor-specific discriminators to evaluate the generated sub-sequence
from the perspectives of different factors. To learn the parameters, we adopt
the classic policy gradient method, and utilize the reward signal of
discriminators for guiding the learning of the generator. Our framework is
flexible to incorporate multiple kinds of factor information, and is able to
trace how each factor contributes to the recommendation decision over time.
Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the
superiority of our proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods, in terms
of effectiveness and interpretability
Information Filtering on Coupled Social Networks
In this paper, based on the coupled social networks (CSN), we propose a
hybrid algorithm to nonlinearly integrate both social and behavior information
of online users. Filtering algorithm based on the coupled social networks,
which considers the effects of both social influence and personalized
preference. Experimental results on two real datasets, \emph{Epinions} and
\emph{Friendfeed}, show that hybrid pattern can not only provide more accurate
recommendations, but also can enlarge the recommendation coverage while
adopting global metric. Further empirical analyses demonstrate that the mutual
reinforcement and rich-club phenomenon can also be found in coupled social
networks where the identical individuals occupy the core position of the online
system. This work may shed some light on the in-depth understanding structure
and function of coupled social networks
Comparison of group recommendation algorithms
In recent years recommender systems have become the common tool to handle the information overload problem of educational and informative web sites, content delivery systems, and online shops. Although most recommender systems make suggestions for individual users, in many circumstances the selected items (e.g., movies) are not intended for personal usage but rather for consumption in groups. This paper investigates how effective group recommendations for movies can be generated by combining the group members' preferences (as expressed by ratings) or by combining the group members' recommendations. These two grouping strategies, which convert traditional recommendation algorithms into group recommendation algorithms, are combined with five commonly used recommendation algorithms to calculate group recommendations for different group compositions. The group recommendations are not only assessed in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of other qualitative aspects that are important for users such as diversity, coverage, and serendipity. In addition, the paper discusses the influence of the size and composition of the group on the quality of the recommendations. The results show that the grouping strategy which produces the most accurate results depends on the algorithm that is used for generating individual recommendations. Therefore, the paper proposes a combination of grouping strategies which outperforms each individual strategy in terms of accuracy. Besides, the results show that the accuracy of the group recommendations increases as the similarity between members of the group increases. Also the diversity, coverage, and serendipity of the group recommendations are to a large extent dependent on the used grouping strategy and recommendation algorithm. Consequently for (commercial) group recommender systems, the grouping strategy and algorithm have to be chosen carefully in order to optimize the desired quality metrics of the group recommendations. The conclusions of this paper can be used as guidelines for this selection process
- …