Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives

With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely, we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models, along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502

Machine Learning and Integrative Analysis of Biomedical Big Data.

Recent developments in high-throughput technologies have accelerated the accumulation of massive amounts of omics data from multiple sources: genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, etc. Traditionally, data from each source (e.g., genome) is analyzed in isolation using statistical and machine learning (ML) methods. Integrative analysis of multi-omics and clinical data is key to new biomedical discoveries and advancements in precision medicine. However, data integration poses new computational challenges as well as exacerbates the ones associated with single-omics studies. Specialized computational approaches are required to effectively and efficiently perform integrative analysis of biomedical data acquired from diverse modalities. In this review, we discuss state-of-the-art ML-based approaches for tackling five specific computational challenges associated with integrative analysis: curse of dimensionality, data heterogeneity, missing data, class imbalance and scalability issues

NESS: Node Embeddings from Static SubGraphs

We present a framework for learning Node Embeddings from Static Subgraphs (NESS) using a graph autoencoder (GAE) in a transductive setting. NESS is based on two key ideas: i) Partitioning the training graph to multiple static, sparse subgraphs with non-overlapping edges using random edge split during data pre-processing, ii) Aggregating the node representations learned from each subgraph to obtain a joint representation of the graph at test time. Moreover, we propose an optional contrastive learning approach in transductive setting. We demonstrate that NESS gives a better node representation for link prediction tasks compared to current autoencoding methods that use either the whole graph or stochastic subgraphs. Our experiments also show that NESS improves the performance of a wide range of graph encoders and achieves state-of-the-art results for link prediction on multiple real-world datasets with edge homophily ratio ranging from strong heterophily to strong homophily.Comment: 16 page

Recommendations for item set completion: On the semantics of item co-occurrence with data sparsity, input size, and input modalities

We address the problem of recommending relevant items to a user in order to "complete" a partial set of items already known. We consider the two scenarios of citation and subject label recommendation, which resemble different semantics of item co-occurrence: relatedness for co-citations and diversity for subject labels. We assess the influence of the completeness of an already known partial item set on the recommender performance. We also investigate data sparsity through a pruning parameter and the influence of using additional metadata. As recommender models, we focus on different autoencoders, which are particularly suited for reconstructing missing items in a set. We extend autoencoders to exploit a multi-modal input of text and structured data. Our experiments on six real-world datasets show that supplying the partial item set as input is helpful when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness, while metadata are effective when co-occurrence implies diversity. This outcome means that the semantics of item co-occurrence is an important factor. The simple item co-occurrence model is a strong baseline for citation recommendation. However, autoencoders have the advantage to enable exploiting additional metadata besides the partial item set as input and achieve comparable performance. For the subject label recommendation task, the title is the most important attribute. Adding more input modalities sometimes even harms the result. In conclusion, it is crucial to consider the semantics of the item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate recommendation model and carefully decide which metadata to exploit

A review of domain adaptation without target labels

Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

MetaRec: Meta-Learning Meets Recommendation Systems

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have recently received increasing attention as powerful modeling tools to improve the performance of recommendation systems. Meta-learning, on the other hand, is a paradigm that has re-surged in popularity within the broader machine learning community over the past several years. In this thesis, we will explore the intersection of these two domains and work on developing methods for integrating meta-learning to design more accurate and flexible recommendation systems. In the present work, we propose a meta-learning framework for the design of collaborative filtering methods in recommendation systems, drawing from ideas, models, and solutions from modern approaches in both the meta-learning and recommendation system literature, applying them to recommendation tasks to obtain improved generalization performance. Our proposed framework, MetaRec, includes and unifies the main state-of-the-art models in recommendation systems, extending them to be flexibly configured and efficiently operate with limited data. We empirically test the architectures created under our MetaRec framework on several recommendation benchmark datasets using a plethora of evaluation metrics and find that by taking a meta-learning approach to the collaborative filtering problem, we observe notable gains in predictive performance