Attentive Neural Architecture Incorporating Song Features For Music Recommendation

Recommender Systems are an integral part of music sharing platforms. Often the aim of these systems is to increase the time, the user spends on the platform and hence having a high commercial value. The systems which aim at increasing the average time a user spends on the platform often need to recommend songs which the user might want to listen to next at each point in time. This is different from recommendation systems which try to predict the item which might be of interest to the user at some point in the user lifetime but not necessarily in the very near future. Prediction of the next song the user might like requires some kind of modeling of the user interests at the given point of time. Attentive neural networks have been exploiting the sequence in which the items were selected by the user to model the implicit short-term interests of the user for the task of next item prediction, however we feel that the features of the songs occurring in the sequence could also convey some important information about the short-term user interest which only the items cannot. In this direction, we propose a novel attentive neural architecture which in addition to the sequence of items selected by the user, uses the features of these items to better learn the user short-term preferences and recommend the next song to the user.Comment: Accepted as a paper at the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 18

A Troubling Analysis of Reproducibility and Progress in Recommender Systems Research

The design of algorithms that generate personalized ranked item lists is a central topic of research in the field of recommender systems. In the past few years, in particular, approaches based on deep learning (neural) techniques have become dominant in the literature. For all of them, substantial progress over the state-of-the-art is claimed. However, indications exist of certain problems in today's research practice, e.g., with respect to the choice and optimization of the baselines used for comparison, raising questions about the published claims. In order to obtain a better understanding of the actual progress, we have tried to reproduce recent results in the area of neural recommendation approaches based on collaborative filtering. The worrying outcome of the analysis of these recent works-all were published at prestigious scientific conferences between 2015 and 2018-is that 11 out of the 12 reproducible neural approaches can be outperformed by conceptually simple methods, e.g., based on the nearest-neighbor heuristics. None of the computationally complex neural methods was actually consistently better than already existing learning-based techniques, e.g., using matrix factorization or linear models. In our analysis, we discuss common issues in today's research practice, which, despite the many papers that are published on the topic, have apparently led the field to a certain level of stagnation.Comment: Source code and full results available at: https://github.com/MaurizioFD/RecSys2019_DeepLearning_Evaluatio

Mise en oeuvre d’une approche sociotechnique de la vie privée pour les systèmes de paiement et de recommandation en ligne

Depuis ses fondements, le domaine de l’Interaction Homme-Machine (IHM) est marqué par le souci constant de concevoir et de produire des systèmes numériques utiles et utilisables, c’est-à-dire adaptés aux utilisateurs dans leur contexte. Vu le développement exponentiel des recherches dans les IHM, deux états des lieux s’imposent dans les environnements en ligne : le concept de confiance et le comportement de l’usager. Ces deux états ne cessent de proliférer dans la plupart des solutions conçues et sont à la croisée des travaux dans les interfaces de paiements en ligne et dans les systèmes de recommandation. Devant les progrès des solutions conçues, l’objectif de cette recherche réside dans le fait de mieux comprendre les différents enjeux dans ces deux domaines, apporter des améliorations et proposer de nouvelles solutions adéquates aux usagers en matière de perception et de comportement en ligne. Outre l’état de l’art et les problématiques, ce travail est divisé en cinq parties principales, chacune contribue à mieux enrichir l’expérience de l’usager en ligne en matière de paiement et recommandations en ligne : • Analyse des multi-craintes en ligne : nous analysons les différents facteurs des sites de commerce électronique qui influent directement sur le comportement des consommateurs en matière de prise de décision et de craintes en ligne. Nous élaborons une méthodologie pour mesurer avec précision le moment où surviennent la question de la confidentialité, les perceptions en ligne et les craintes de divulgation et de pertes financières. • Intégration de personnalisation, contrôle et paiement conditionnel : nous proposons une nouvelle plateforme de paiement en ligne qui supporte à la fois la personnalisation et les paiements multiples et conditionnels, tout en préservant la vie privée du détenteur de carte. • Exploration de l’interaction des usagers en ligne versus la sensibilisation à la cybersécurité : nous relatons une expérience de magasinage en ligne qui met en relief la perception du risque de cybercriminalité dans les activités en ligne et le comportement des utilisateurs lié à leur préoccupation en matière de confidentialité. • Équilibre entre utilité des données et vie privée : nous proposons un modèle de préservation de vie privée basé sur l’algorithme « k-means » et sur le modèle « k-coRating » afin de soutenir l’utilité des données dans les recommandations en ligne tout en préservant la vie privée des usagers. • Métrique de stabilité des préférences des utilisateurs : nous ciblons une meilleure méthode de recommandation qui respecte le changement des préférences des usagers par l’intermédiaire d’un réseau neural. Ce qui constitue une amélioration à la fois efficace et performante pour les systèmes de recommandation. Cette thèse porte essentiellement sur quatre aspects majeurs liés : 1) aux plateformes des paiements en ligne, 2) au comportement de l’usager dans les transactions de paiement en ligne (prise de décision, multi-craintes, cybersécurité, perception du risque), 3) à la stabilité de ses préférences dans les recommandations en ligne, 4) à l’équilibre entre vie privée et utilité des données en ligne pour les systèmes de recommandation.Technologies in Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) are playing a vital role across the entire production process to design and deliver advanced digital systems. Given the exponential development of research in this field, two concepts are largely addressed to increase performance and efficiency of online environments: trust and user behavior. These two extents continue to proliferate in most designed solutions and are increasingly enriched by continuous investments in online payments and recommender systems. Along with the trend of digitalization, the objective of this research is to gain a better understanding of the various challenges in these two areas, make improvements and propose solutions more convenient to the users in terms of online perception and user behavior. In addition to the state of the art and challenges, this work is divided into five main parts, each one contributes to better enrich the online user experience in both online payments and system recommendations: • Online customer fears: We analyze different components of the website that may affect customer behavior in decision-making and online fears. We focus on customer perceptions regarding privacy violations and financial loss. We examine the influence on trust and payment security perception as well as their joint effect on three fundamentally important customers’ aspects: confidentiality, privacy concerns and financial fear perception. • Personalization, control and conditional payment: we propose a new online payment platform that supports both personalization and conditional multi-payments, while preserving the privacy of the cardholder. • Exploring user behavior and cybersecurity knowledge: we design a new website to conduct an experimental study in online shopping. The results highlight the impact of user’s perception in cybersecurity and privacy concerns on his online behavior when dealing with shopping activities. • Balance between data utility and user privacy: we propose a privacy-preserving method based on the “k-means” algorithm and the “k-coRating” model to support the utility of data in online recommendations while preserving user’s privacy. • User interest constancy metric: we propose a neural network to predict the user’s interests in recommender systems. Our aim is to provide an efficient method that respects the constancy and variations in user preferences. In this thesis, we focus on four major contributions related to: 1) online payment platforms, 2) user behavior in online payments regarding decision making, multi-fears and cyber security 3) user interest constancy in online recommendations, 4) balance between privacy and utility of online data in recommender systems