TrustDL: Use of trust-based dictionary learning to facilitate recommendation in social networks

peer reviewedCollaborative filtering (CF) is a widely applied method to perform recommendation tasks in a wide range of domains and applications. Dictionary learning (DL) models, which are highly important in CF-based recommender systems (RSs), are well represented by rating matrices. However, these methods alone do not resolve the cold start and data sparsity issues in RSs. We observed a significant improvement in rating results by adding trust information on the social network. For that purpose, we proposed a new dictionary learning technique based on trust information, called TrustDL, where the social network data were employed in the process of recommendation based on structural details on the trusted network. TrustDL sought to integrate the sources of information, including trust statements and ratings, into the recommendation model to mitigate both problems of cold start and data sparsity. It conducted dictionary learning and trust embedding simultaneously to predict unknown rating values. In this paper, the dictionary learning technique was integrated into rating learning, along with the trust consistency regularization term designed to offer a more accurate understanding of the feature representation. Moreover, partially identical trust embedding was developed, where users with similar rating sets could cluster together, and those with similar rating sets could be represented collaboratively. The proposed strategy appears significantly beneficial based on experiments conducted on four frequently used datasets: Epinions, Ciao, FilmTrust, and Flixster

A survey of recommender systems for energy efficiency in buildings: Principles, challenges and prospects

Recommender systems have significantly developed in recent years in parallel with the witnessed advancements in both internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Accordingly, as a consequence of IoT and AI, multiple forms of data are incorporated in these systems, e.g. social, implicit, local and personal information, which can help in improving recommender systems' performance and widen their applicability to traverse different disciplines. On the other side, energy efficiency in the building sector is becoming a hot research topic, in which recommender systems play a major role by promoting energy saving behavior and reducing carbon emissions. However, the deployment of the recommendation frameworks in buildings still needs more investigations to identify the current challenges and issues, where their solutions are the keys to enable the pervasiveness of research findings, and therefore, ensure a large-scale adoption of this technology. Accordingly, this paper presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first timely and comprehensive reference for energy-efficiency recommendation systems through (i) surveying existing recommender systems for energy saving in buildings; (ii) discussing their evolution; (iii) providing an original taxonomy of these systems based on specified criteria, including the nature of the recommender engine, its objective, computing platforms, evaluation metrics and incentive measures; and (iv) conducting an in-depth, critical analysis to identify their limitations and unsolved issues. The derived challenges and areas of future implementation could effectively guide the energy research community to improve the energy-efficiency in buildings and reduce the cost of developed recommender systems-based solutions.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl

Learning with Scalability and Compactness

Artificial Intelligence has been thriving for decades since its birth. Traditional AI features heuristic search and planning, providing good strategy for tasks that are inherently search-based problems, such as games and GPS searching. In the meantime, machine learning, arguably the hottest subfield of AI, embraces data-driven methodology with great success in a wide range of applications such as computer vision and speech recognition. As a new trend, the applications of both learning and search have shifted toward mobile and embedded devices which entails not only scalability but also compactness of the models. Under this general paradigm, we propose a series of work to address the issues of scalability and compactness within machine learning and its applications on heuristic search. We first focus on the scalability issue of memory-based heuristic search which is recently ameliorated by Maximum Variance Unfolding (MVU), a manifold learning algorithm capable of learning state embeddings as effective heuristics to speed up $A^*$ search. Though achieving unprecedented online search performance with constraints on memory footprint, MVU is notoriously slow on offline training. To address this problem, we introduce Maximum Variance Correction (MVC), which finds large-scale feasible solutions to MVU by post-processing embeddings from any manifold learning algorithm. It increases the scale of MVU embeddings by several orders of magnitude and is naturally parallel. We further propose Goal-oriented Euclidean Heuristic (GOEH), a variant to MVU embeddings, which preferably optimizes the heuristics associated with goals in the embedding while maintaining their admissibility. We demonstrate unmatched reductions in search time across several non-trivial $A^*$ benchmark search problems. Through these work, we bridge the gap between the manifold learning literature and heuristic search which have been regarded as fundamentally different, leading to cross-fertilization for both fields. Deep learning has made a big splash in the machine learning community with its superior accuracy performance. However, it comes at a price of huge model size that might involves billions of parameters, which poses great challenges for its use on mobile and embedded devices. To achieve the compactness, we propose HashedNets, a general approach to compressing neural network models leveraging feature hashing. At its core, HashedNets randomly group parameters using a low-cost hash function, and share parameter value within the group. According to our empirical results, a neural network could be 32x smaller with little drop in accuracy performance. We further introduce Frequency-Sensitive Hashed Nets (FreshNets) to extend this hashing technique to convolutional neural network by compressing parameters in the frequency domain. Compared with many AI applications, neural networks seem not graining as much popularity as it should be in traditional data mining tasks. For these tasks, categorical features need to be first converted to numerical representation in advance in order for neural networks to process them. We show that a na\ {i}ve use of the classic one-hot encoding may result in gigantic weight matrices and therefore lead to prohibitively expensive memory cost in neural networks. Inspired by word embedding, we advocate a compellingly simple, yet effective neural network architecture with category embedding. It is capable of directly handling both numerical and categorical features as well as providing visual insights on feature similarities. At the end, we conduct comprehensive empirical evaluation which showcases the efficacy and practicality of our approach, and provides surprisingly good visualization and clustering for categorical features

Simple and effective neural-free soft-cluster embeddings for item cold-start recommendations

Recommender systems are widely used in online platforms for easy exploration of personalized content. The best available recommendation algorithms are based on using the observed preference information among collaborating entities. A significant challenge in recommender system continues to be item cold-start recommendation: how to effectively recommend items with no observed or past preference information. Here we propose a two-stage algorithm based on soft clustering to provide an efficient solution to this problem. The crux of our approach lies in representing the items as soft-cluster embeddings in the space spanned by the side-information associated with the items. Though many item embedding approaches have been proposed for item cold-start recommendations in the past—and simple as they might appear—to the best of our knowledge, the approach based on soft-cluster embeddings has not been proposed in the research literature. Our experimental results on four benchmark datasets conclusively demonstrate that the proposed algorithm makes accurate recommendations in item cold-start settings compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms according to commonly used ranking metrics like Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) and Mean Average Precision (MAP). The performance of our proposed algorithm on the MovieLens 20M dataset clearly demonstrates the scalability aspect of our algorithm compared to other popular algorithms. We also propose the metric Cold Items Precision (CIP) to quantify the ability of a system to recommend cold-start items. CIP can be used in conjunction with relevance ranking metrics like NDCG and MAP to measure the effectiveness of the cold-start recommendation algorithm

Receptive fields optimization in deep learning for enhanced interpretability, diversity, and resource efficiency.

In both supervised and unsupervised learning settings, deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to perform hierarchical and discriminative representation of data. They are capable of automatically extracting excellent hierarchy of features from raw data without the need for manual feature engineering. Over the past few years, the general trend has been that DNNs have grown deeper and larger, amounting to huge number of final parameters and highly nonlinear cascade of features, thus improving the flexibility and accuracy of resulting models. In order to account for the scale, diversity and the difficulty of data DNNs learn from, the architectural complexity and the excessive number of weights are often deliberately built in into their design. This flexibility and performance usually come with high computational and memory demands both during training and inference. In addition, insight into the mappings DNN models perform and human ability to understand them still remain very limited. This dissertation addresses some of these limitations by balancing three conflicting objectives: computational/ memory demands, interpretability, and accuracy. This dissertation first introduces some unsupervised feature learning methods in a broader context of dictionary learning. It also sets the tone for deep autoencoder learning and constraints for data representations in light of removing some of the aforementioned bottlenecks such as the feature interpretability of deep learning models with nonnegativity constraints on receptive fields. In addition, the two main classes of solution to the drawbacks associated with overparameterization/ over-complete representation in deep learning models are also presented. Subsequently, two novel methods, one for each solution class, are presented to address the problems resulting from over-complete representation exhibited by most deep learning models. The first method is developed to achieve inference-cost-efficient models via elimination of redundant features with negligible deterioration of prediction accuracy. This is important especially for deploying deep learning models into resource-limited portable devices. The second method aims at diversifying the features of DNNs in the learning phase to improve their performance without undermining their size and capacity. Lastly, feature diversification is considered to stabilize adversarial learning and extensive experimental outcomes show that these methods have the potential of advancing the current state-of-the-art on different learning tasks and benchmark datasets

병렬화 용이한 통계계산 방법론과 현대 고성능 컴퓨팅 환경에의 적용

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 자연과학대학 통계학과, 2020. 8. 원중호.Technological advances in the past decade, hardware and software alike, have made access to high-performance computing (HPC) easier than ever. In this dissertation, easily-parallelizable, inversion-free, and variable-separated algorithms and their implementation in statistical computing are discussed. The first part considers statistical estimation problems under structured sparsity posed as minimization of a sum of two or three convex functions, one of which is a composition of non-smooth and linear functions. Examples include graph-guided sparse fused lasso and overlapping group lasso. Two classes of inversion-free primal-dual algorithms are considered and unified from a perspective of monotone operator theory. From this unification, a continuum of preconditioned forward-backward operator splitting algorithms amenable to parallel and distributed computing is proposed. The unification is further exploited to introduce a continuum of accelerated algorithms on which the theoretically optimal asymptotic rate of convergence is obtained. For the second part, easy-to-use distributed matrix data structures in PyTorch and Julia are presented. They enable users to write code once and run it anywhere from a laptop to a workstation with multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) or a supercomputer in a cloud. With these data structures, various parallelizable statistical applications, including nonnegative matrix factorization, positron emission tomography, multidimensional scaling, and ℓ1-regularized Cox regression, are demonstrated. The examples scale up to an 8-GPU workstation and a 720-CPU-core cluster in a cloud. As a case in point, the onset of type-2 diabetes from the UK Biobank with 400,000 subjects and about 500,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms is analyzed using the HPC ℓ1-regularized Cox regression. Fitting a half-million variate model took about 50 minutes, reconfirming known associations. To my knowledge, the feasibility of a joint genome-wide association analysis of survival outcomes at this scale is first demonstrated.지난 10년간의 하드웨어와 소프트웨어의 기술적인 발전은 고성능 컴퓨팅의 접근장벽을 그 어느 때보다 낮추었다. 이 학위논문에서는 병렬화 용이하고 역행렬 연산이 없는 변수 분리 알고리즘과 그 통계계산에서의 구현을 논의한다. 첫 부분은 볼록 함수 두 개 또는 세 개의 합으로 나타나는 구조화된 희소 통계 추정 문제에 대해 다룬다. 이 때 함수들 중 하나는 비평활 함수와 선형 함수의 합성으로 나타난다. 그 예시로는 그래프 구조를 통해 유도되는 희소 융합 Lasso 문제와 한 변수가 여러 그룹에 속할 수 있는 그룹 Lasso 문제가 있다. 이를 풀기 위해 역행렬 연산이 없는 두 종류의 원시-쌍대 (primal-dual) 알고리즘을 단조 연산자 이론 관점에서 통합하며 이를 통해 병렬화 용이한 precondition된 전방-후방 연산자 분할 알고리즘의 집합을 제안한다. 이 통합은 점근적으로 최적 수렴률을 갖는 가속 알고리즘의 집합을 구성하는 데 활용된다. 두 번째 부분에서는 PyTorch와 Julia를 통해 사용하기 쉬운 분산 행렬 자료 구조를 제시한다. 이 구조는 사용자들이 코드를 한 번 작성하면 이것을 노트북 한 대에서부터 여러 대의 그래픽 처리 장치 (GPU)를 가진 워크스테이션, 또는 클라우드 상에 있는 슈퍼컴퓨터까지 다양한 스케일에서 실행할 수 있게 해 준다. 아울러, 이 자료 구조를 비음 행렬 분해, 양전자 단층 촬영, 다차원 척 도법, ℓ1-벌점화 Cox 회귀 분석 등 다양한 병렬화 가능한 통계적 문제에 적용한다. 이 예시들은 8대의 GPU가 있는 워크스테이션과 720개의 코어가 있는 클라우드 상의 가상 클러스터에서 확장 가능했다. 한 사례로 400,000명의 대상과 500,000개의 단일 염기 다형성 정보가 있는 UK Biobank 자료에서의 제2형 당뇨병 (T2D) 발병 나이를 ℓ1-벌점화 Cox 회귀 모형을 통해 분석했다. 500,000개의 변수가 있는 모형을 적합시키는 데 50분 가량의 시간이 걸렸으며 알려진 T2D 관련 다형성들을 재확인할 수 있었다. 이러한 규모의 전유전체 결합 생존 분석은 최초로 시도된 것이다.Chapter1Prologue 1 1.1 Introduction 1 1.2 Accessible High-Performance Computing Systems 4 1.2.1 Preliminaries 4 1.2.2 Multiple CPU nodes: clusters, supercomputers, and clouds 7 1.2.3 Multi-GPU node 9 1.3 Highly Parallelizable Algorithms 12 1.3.1 MM algorithms 12 1.3.2 Proximal gradient descent 14 1.3.3 Proximal distance algorithm 16 1.3.4 Primal-dual methods 17 Chapter 2 Easily Parallelizable and Distributable Class of Algorithms for Structured Sparsity, with Optimal Acceleration 20 2.1 Introduction 20 2.2 Unification of Algorithms LV and CV (g ≡ 0) 30 2.2.1 Relation between Algorithms LV and CV 30 2.2.2 Unified algorithm class 34 2.2.3 Convergence analysis 35 2.3 Optimal acceleration 39 2.3.1 Algorithms 40 2.3.2 Convergence analysis 41 2.4 Stochastic optimal acceleration 45 2.4.1 Algorithm 45 2.4.2 Convergence analysis 47 2.5 Numerical experiments 50 2.5.1 Model problems 50 2.5.2 Convergence behavior 52 2.5.3 Scalability 62 2.6 Discussion 63 Chapter 3 Towards Unified Programming for High-Performance Statistical Computing Environments 66 3.1 Introduction 66 3.2 Related Software 69 3.2.1 Message-passing interface and distributed array interfaces 69 3.2.2 Unified array interfaces for CPU and GPU 69 3.3 Easy-to-use Software Libraries for HPC 70 3.3.1 Deep learning libraries and HPC 70 3.3.2 Case study: PyTorch versus TensorFlow 73 3.3.3 A brief introduction to PyTorch 76 3.3.4 A brief introduction to Julia 80 3.3.5 Methods and multiple dispatch 80 3.3.6 Multidimensional arrays 82 3.3.7 Matrix multiplication 83 3.3.8 Dot syntax for vectorization 86 3.4 Distributed matrix data structure 87 3.4.1 Distributed matrices in PyTorch: distmat 87 3.4.2 Distributed arrays in Julia: MPIArray 90 3.5 Examples 98 3.5.1 Nonnegative matrix factorization 100 3.5.2 Positron emission tomography 109 3.5.3 Multidimensional scaling 113 3.5.4 L1-regularized Cox regression 117 3.5.5 Genome-wide survival analysis of the UK Biobank dataset 121 3.6 Discussion 126 Chapter 4 Conclusion 131 Appendix A Monotone Operator Theory 134 Appendix B Proofs for Chapter II 139 B.1 Preconditioned forward-backward splitting 139 B.2 Optimal acceleration 147 B.3 Optimal stochastic acceleration 158 Appendix C AWS EC2 and ParallelCluster 168 C.1 Overview 168 C.2 Glossary 169 C.3 Prerequisites 172 C.4 Installation 173 C.5 Configuration 173 C.6 Creating, accessing, and destroying the cluster 178 C.7 Installation of libraries 178 C.8 Running a job 179 C.9 Miscellaneous 180 Appendix D Code for memory-efficient L1-regularized Cox proportional hazards model 182 Appendix E Details of SNPs selected in L1-regularized Cox regression 184 Bibliography 188 국문초록 212Docto