10,333 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
Diverse personalized recommendations with uncertainty from implicit preference data with the Bayesian Mallows Model
Clicking data, which exists in abundance and contains objective user
preference information, is widely used to produce personalized recommendations
in web-based applications. Current popular recommendation algorithms, typically
based on matrix factorizations, often have high accuracy and achieve good
clickthrough rates. However, diversity of the recommended items, which can
greatly enhance user experiences, is often overlooked. Moreover, most
algorithms do not produce interpretable uncertainty quantifications of the
recommendations. In this work, we propose the Bayesian Mallows for Clicking
Data (BMCD) method, which augments clicking data into compatible full ranking
vectors by enforcing all the clicked items to be top-ranked. User preferences
are learned using a Mallows ranking model. Bayesian inference leads to
interpretable uncertainties of each individual recommendation, and we also
propose a method to make personalized recommendations based on such
uncertainties. With a simulation study and a real life data example, we
demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art matrix factorization, BMCD makes
personalized recommendations with similar accuracy, while achieving much higher
level of diversity, and producing interpretable and actionable uncertainty
estimation.Comment: 27 page
Visualizing recommendations to support exploration, transparency and controllability
Research on recommender systems has traditionally focused on the development of algorithms to improve accuracy of recommendations. So far, little research has been done to enable user interaction with such systems as a basis to support exploration and control by end users. In this paper, we present our research on the use of information visualization techniques to interact with recommender systems. We investigated how information visualization can improve user understanding of the typically black-box rationale behind recommendations in order to increase their perceived relevance and meaning and to support exploration and user involvement in the recommendation process. Our study has been performed using TalkExplorer, an interactive visualization tool developed for attendees of academic conferences. The results of user studies performed at two conferences allowed us to obtain interesting insights to enhance user interfaces that integrate recommendation technology. More specifically, effectiveness and probability of item selection both increase when users are able to explore and interrelate multiple entities - i.e. items bookmarked by users, recommendations and tags. Copyright © 2013 ACM
- …