4,345 research outputs found
An Ontology-Based Recommender System with an Application to the Star Trek Television Franchise
Collaborative filtering based recommender systems have proven to be extremely
successful in settings where user preference data on items is abundant.
However, collaborative filtering algorithms are hindered by their weakness
against the item cold-start problem and general lack of interpretability.
Ontology-based recommender systems exploit hierarchical organizations of users
and items to enhance browsing, recommendation, and profile construction. While
ontology-based approaches address the shortcomings of their collaborative
filtering counterparts, ontological organizations of items can be difficult to
obtain for items that mostly belong to the same category (e.g., television
series episodes). In this paper, we present an ontology-based recommender
system that integrates the knowledge represented in a large ontology of
literary themes to produce fiction content recommendations. The main novelty of
this work is an ontology-based method for computing similarities between items
and its integration with the classical Item-KNN (K-nearest neighbors)
algorithm. As a study case, we evaluated the proposed method against other
approaches by performing the classical rating prediction task on a collection
of Star Trek television series episodes in an item cold-start scenario. This
transverse evaluation provides insights into the utility of different
information resources and methods for the initial stages of recommender system
development. We found our proposed method to be a convenient alternative to
collaborative filtering approaches for collections of mostly similar items,
particularly when other content-based approaches are not applicable or
otherwise unavailable. Aside from the new methods, this paper contributes a
testbed for future research and an online framework to collaboratively extend
the ontology of literary themes to cover other narrative content.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, minor revision
A personalized and context-aware news offer for mobile devices
For classical domains, such as movies, recommender systems have proven their usefulness. But recommending news is more challenging due to the short life span of news content and the demand for up-to-date recommendations. This paper presents a news recommendation service with a content-based algorithm that uses features of a search engine for content processing and indexing, and a collaborative filtering algorithm for serendipity. The extension towards a context-aware algorithm is made to assess the information value of context in a mobile environment through a user study. Analyzing interaction behavior and feedback of users on three recommendation approaches shows that interaction with the content is crucial input for user modeling. Context-aware recommendations using time and device type as context data outperform traditional recommendations with an accuracy gain dependent on the contextual situation. These findings demonstrate that the user experience of news services can be improved by a personalized context-aware news offer
An improved switching hybrid recommender system using naive Bayes classifier and collaborative filtering
Recommender Systems apply machine learning and data mining techniques for filtering unseen information and can predict whether a user would like a given resource. To date a number of recommendation algorithms have been proposed, where collaborative filtering and content-based filtering are the two most famous and adopted recommendation techniques. Collaborative filtering recommender systems recommend items by identifying other users with similar taste and use their opinions for recommendation; whereas content-based recommender systems recommend items based on the content information of the items. These systems suffer from scalability, data sparsity, over specialization, and cold-start problems resulting in poor quality recommendations and reduced coverage. Hybrid recommender systems combine individual systems to avoid certain aforementioned limitations of these systems. In this paper, we proposed a unique switching hybrid recommendation approach by combining a Naive Bayes classification approach with the collaborative filtering. Experimental results on two different data sets, show that the proposed algorithm is scalable and provide better performance – in terms of accuracy and coverage – than other algorithms while at the same time eliminates some recorded problems with the recommender systems
NEXT LEVEL: A COURSE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM BASED ON CAREER INTERESTS
Skills-based hiring is a talent management approach that empowers employers to align recruitment around business results, rather than around credentials and title. It starts with employers identifying the particular skills required for a role, and then screening and evaluating candidates’ competencies against those requirements. With the recent rise in employers adopting skills-based hiring practices, it has become integral for students to take courses that improve their marketability and support their long-term career success. A 2017 survey of over 32,000 students at 43 randomly selected institutions found that only 34% of students believe they will graduate with the skills and knowledge required to be successful in the job market. Furthermore, the study found that while 96% of chief academic officers believe that their institutions are very or somewhat effective at preparing students for the workforce, only 11% of business leaders strongly agree [11]. An implication of the misalignment is that college graduates lack the skills that companies need and value. Fortunately, the rise of skills-based hiring provides an opportunity for universities and students to establish and follow clearer classroom-to-career pathways. To this end, this paper presents a course recommender system that aims to improve students’ career readiness by suggesting relevant skills and courses based on their unique career interests
A Theoretical Analysis of Two-Stage Recommendation for Cold-Start Collaborative Filtering
In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for tackling the cold-start
collaborative filtering problem, where unknown targets (items or users) keep
coming to the system, and there is a limited number of resources (users or
items) that can be allocated and related to them. The solution requires a
trade-off between exploitation and exploration as with the limited
recommendation opportunities, we need to, on one hand, allocate the most
relevant resources right away, but, on the other hand, it is also necessary to
allocate resources that are useful for learning the target's properties in
order to recommend more relevant ones in the future. In this paper, we study a
simple two-stage recommendation combining a sequential and a batch solution
together. We first model the problem with the partially observable Markov
decision process (POMDP) and provide an exact solution. Then, through an
in-depth analysis over the POMDP value iteration solution, we identify that an
exact solution can be abstracted as selecting resources that are not only
highly relevant to the target according to the initial-stage information, but
also highly correlated, either positively or negatively, with other potential
resources for the next stage. With this finding, we propose an approximate
solution to ease the intractability of the exact solution. Our initial results
on synthetic data and the Movie Lens 100K dataset confirm the performance gains
of our theoretical development and analysis
Budget-Constrained Item Cold-Start Handling in Collaborative Filtering Recommenders via Optimal Design
It is well known that collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems
provide better modeling of users and items associated with considerable rating
history. The lack of historical ratings results in the user and the item
cold-start problems. The latter is the main focus of this work. Most of the
current literature addresses this problem by integrating content-based
recommendation techniques to model the new item. However, in many cases such
content is not available, and the question arises is whether this problem can
be mitigated using CF techniques only. We formalize this problem as an
optimization problem: given a new item, a pool of available users, and a budget
constraint, select which users to assign with the task of rating the new item
in order to minimize the prediction error of our model. We show that the
objective function is monotone-supermodular, and propose efficient optimal
design based algorithms that attain an approximation to its optimum. Our
findings are verified by an empirical study using the Netflix dataset, where
the proposed algorithms outperform several baselines for the problem at hand.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure
Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years,
thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which
nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip.
While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these
huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In
particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation
strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or
content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener
needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and
related publications quite sparse.
The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify
and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research
is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of
the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second,
we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further
evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving
the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and
providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet
under-researched, directions in the field
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