5,367 research outputs found
Capturing Popularity Trends: A Simplistic Non-Personalized Approach for Enhanced Item Recommendation
Recommender systems have been gaining increasing research attention over the
years. Most existing recommendation methods focus on capturing users'
personalized preferences through historical user-item interactions, which may
potentially violate user privacy. Additionally, these approaches often overlook
the significance of the temporal fluctuation in item popularity that can sway
users' decision-making. To bridge this gap, we propose Popularity-Aware
Recommender (PARE), which makes non-personalized recommendations by predicting
the items that will attain the highest popularity. PARE consists of four
modules, each focusing on a different aspect: popularity history, temporal
impact, periodic impact, and side information. Finally, an attention layer is
leveraged to fuse the outputs of four modules. To our knowledge, this is the
first work to explicitly model item popularity in recommendation systems.
Extensive experiments show that PARE performs on par or even better than
sophisticated state-of-the-art recommendation methods. Since PARE prioritizes
item popularity over personalized user preferences, it can enhance existing
recommendation methods as a complementary component. Our experiments
demonstrate that integrating PARE with existing recommendation methods
significantly surpasses the performance of standalone models, highlighting
PARE's potential as a complement to existing recommendation methods.
Furthermore, the simplicity of PARE makes it immensely practical for industrial
applications and a valuable baseline for future research.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
Knowledge-aware Complementary Product Representation Learning
Learning product representations that reflect complementary relationship
plays a central role in e-commerce recommender system. In the absence of the
product relationships graph, which existing methods rely on, there is a need to
detect the complementary relationships directly from noisy and sparse customer
purchase activities. Furthermore, unlike simple relationships such as
similarity, complementariness is asymmetric and non-transitive. Standard usage
of representation learning emphasizes on only one set of embedding, which is
problematic for modelling such properties of complementariness. We propose
using knowledge-aware learning with dual product embedding to solve the above
challenges. We encode contextual knowledge into product representation by
multi-task learning, to alleviate the sparsity issue. By explicitly modelling
with user bias terms, we separate the noise of customer-specific preferences
from the complementariness. Furthermore, we adopt the dual embedding framework
to capture the intrinsic properties of complementariness and provide geometric
interpretation motivated by the classic separating hyperplane theory. Finally,
we propose a Bayesian network structure that unifies all the components, which
also concludes several popular models as special cases. The proposed method
compares favourably to state-of-art methods, in downstream classification and
recommendation tasks. We also develop an implementation that scales efficiently
to a dataset with millions of items and customers
Modeling user preference dynamics with coupled tensor factorization for social media recommendation
An essential problem in real-world recommender systems is that user preferences are not static and users are likely to change their preferences over time. Recent studies have shown that the modelling and capturing the dynamics of user preferences lead to significant improvements on recommendation accuracy and, consequently, user satisfaction. In this paper, we develop a framework to capture user preference dynamics in a personalized manner based on the fact that changes in user preferences can vary individually. We also consider the plausible assumption that older user activities should have less influence on a user’s current preferences. We introduce an individual time decay factor for each user according to the rate of his preference dynamics to weigh the past user preferences and decrease their importance gradually. We exploit users’ demographics as well as the extracted similarities among users over time, aiming to enhance the prior knowledge about user preference dynamics, in addition to the past weighted user preferences in a developed coupled tensor factorization technique to provide top-K recommendations. The experimental results on the two real social media datasets—Last.fm and Movielens—indicate that our proposed model is better and more robust than other competitive methods in terms of recommendation accuracy and is more capable of coping with problems such as cold-start and data sparsity
Towards Question-based Recommender Systems
Conversational and question-based recommender systems have gained increasing
attention in recent years, with users enabled to converse with the system and
better control recommendations. Nevertheless, research in the field is still
limited, compared to traditional recommender systems. In this work, we propose
a novel Question-based recommendation method, Qrec, to assist users to find
items interactively, by answering automatically constructed and algorithmically
chosen questions. Previous conversational recommender systems ask users to
express their preferences over items or item facets. Our model, instead, asks
users to express their preferences over descriptive item features. The model is
first trained offline by a novel matrix factorization algorithm, and then
iteratively updates the user and item latent factors online by a closed-form
solution based on the user answers. Meanwhile, our model infers the underlying
user belief and preferences over items to learn an optimal question-asking
strategy by using Generalized Binary Search, so as to ask a sequence of
questions to the user. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed
matrix factorization model outperforms the traditional Probabilistic Matrix
Factorization model. Further, our proposed Qrec model can greatly improve the
performance of state-of-the-art baselines, and it is also effective in the case
of cold-start user and item recommendations.Comment: accepted by SIGIR 202
Exploiting Synergy Between Ontologies and Recommender Systems
Recommender systems learn about user preferences over time, automatically finding things of similar interest. This reduces the burden of creating explicit queries. Recommender systems do, however, suffer from cold-start problems where no initial information is available early on upon which to base recommendations. Semantic knowledge structures, such as ontologies, can provide valuable domain knowledge and user information. However, acquiring such knowledge and keeping it up to date is not a trivial task and user interests are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain. This paper investigates the synergy between a web-based research paper recommender system and an ontology containing information automatically extracted from departmental databases available on the web. The ontology is used to address the recommender systems cold-start problem. The recommender system addresses the ontology's interest-acquisition problem. An empirical evaluation of this approach is conducted and the performance of the integrated systems measured
- …