Chiron: A Robust Recommendation System with Graph Regularizer

Recommendation systems have been widely used by commercial service providers for giving suggestions to users. Collaborative filtering (CF) systems, one of the most popular recommendation systems, utilize the history of behaviors of the aggregate user-base to provide individual recommendations and are effective when almost all users faithfully express their opinions. However, they are vulnerable to malicious users biasing their inputs in order to change the overall ratings of a specific group of items. CF systems largely fall into two categories - neighborhood-based and (matrix) factorization-based - and the presence of adversarial input can influence recommendations in both categories, leading to instabilities in estimation and prediction. Although the robustness of different collaborative filtering algorithms has been extensively studied, designing an efficient system that is immune to manipulation remains a significant challenge. In this work we propose a novel "hybrid" recommendation system with an adaptive graph-based user/item similarity-regularization - "Chiron". Chiron ties the performance benefits of dimensionality reduction (through factorization) with the advantage of neighborhood clustering (through regularization). We demonstrate, using extensive comparative experiments, that Chiron is resistant to manipulation by large and lethal attacks

Beyond Low Rank + Sparse: Multi-scale Low Rank Matrix Decomposition

We present a natural generalization of the recent low rank + sparse matrix decomposition and consider the decomposition of matrices into components of multiple scales. Such decomposition is well motivated in practice as data matrices often exhibit local correlations in multiple scales. Concretely, we propose a multi-scale low rank modeling that represents a data matrix as a sum of block-wise low rank matrices with increasing scales of block sizes. We then consider the inverse problem of decomposing the data matrix into its multi-scale low rank components and approach the problem via a convex formulation. Theoretically, we show that under various incoherence conditions, the convex program recovers the multi-scale low rank components \revised{either exactly or approximately}. Practically, we provide guidance on selecting the regularization parameters and incorporate cycle spinning to reduce blocking artifacts. Experimentally, we show that the multi-scale low rank decomposition provides a more intuitive decomposition than conventional low rank methods and demonstrate its effectiveness in four applications, including illumination normalization for face images, motion separation for surveillance videos, multi-scale modeling of the dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging and collaborative filtering exploiting age information

CRUC: Cold-start Recommendations Using Collaborative Filtering in Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims at interconnecting everyday objects (including both things and users) and then using this connection information to provide customized user services. However, IoT does not work in its initial stages without adequate acquisition of user preferences. This is caused by cold-start problem that is a situation where only few users are interconnected. To this end, we propose CRUC scheme - Cold-start Recommendations Using Collaborative Filtering in IoT, involving formulation, filtering and prediction steps. Extensive experiments over real cases and simulation have been performed to evaluate the performance of CRUC scheme. Experimental results show that CRUC efficiently solves the cold-start problem in IoT.Comment: Elsevier ESEP 2011: 9-10 December 2011, Singapore, Elsevier Energy Procedia, http://www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia/, 201

Matrix factorization with rating completion : an enhanced SVD Model for collaborative filtering recommender systems

Collaborative filtering algorithms, such as matrix factorization techniques, are recently gaining momentum due to their promising performance on recommender systems. However, most collaborative filtering algorithms suffer from data sparsity. Active learning algorithms are effective in reducing the sparsity problem for recommender systems by requesting users to give ratings to some items when they enter the systems. In this paper, a new matrix factorization model, called Enhanced SVD (ESVD) is proposed, which incorporates the classic matrix factorization algorithms with ratings completion inspired by active learning. In addition, the connection between the prediction accuracy and the density of matrix is built to further explore its potentials. We also propose the Multi-layer ESVD, which learns the model iteratively to further improve the prediction accuracy. To handle the imbalanced data sets that contain far more users than items or more items than users, the Item-wise ESVD and User-wise ESVD are presented, respectively. The proposed methods are evaluated on the famous Netflix and Movielens data sets. Experimental results validate their effectiveness in terms of both accuracy and efficiency when compared with traditional matrix factorization methods and active learning methods

Low-Rank Matrices on Graphs: Generalized Recovery & Applications

Many real world datasets subsume a linear or non-linear low-rank structure in a very low-dimensional space. Unfortunately, one often has very little or no information about the geometry of the space, resulting in a highly under-determined recovery problem. Under certain circumstances, state-of-the-art algorithms provide an exact recovery for linear low-rank structures but at the expense of highly inscalable algorithms which use nuclear norm. However, the case of non-linear structures remains unresolved. We revisit the problem of low-rank recovery from a totally different perspective, involving graphs which encode pairwise similarity between the data samples and features. Surprisingly, our analysis confirms that it is possible to recover many approximate linear and non-linear low-rank structures with recovery guarantees with a set of highly scalable and efficient algorithms. We call such data matrices as \textit{Low-Rank matrices on graphs} and show that many real world datasets satisfy this assumption approximately due to underlying stationarity. Our detailed theoretical and experimental analysis unveils the power of the simple, yet very novel recovery framework \textit{Fast Robust PCA on Graphs

Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering

Learning vector representations (aka. embeddings) of users and items lies at the core of modern recommender systems. Ranging from early matrix factorization to recently emerged deep learning based methods, existing efforts typically obtain a user's (or an item's) embedding by mapping from pre-existing features that describe the user (or the item), such as ID and attributes. We argue that an inherent drawback of such methods is that, the collaborative signal, which is latent in user-item interactions, is not encoded in the embedding process. As such, the resultant embeddings may not be sufficient to capture the collaborative filtering effect. In this work, we propose to integrate the user-item interactions -- more specifically the bipartite graph structure -- into the embedding process. We develop a new recommendation framework Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering (NGCF), which exploits the user-item graph structure by propagating embeddings on it. This leads to the expressive modeling of high-order connectivity in user-item graph, effectively injecting the collaborative signal into the embedding process in an explicit manner. We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements over several state-of-the-art models like HOP-Rec and Collaborative Memory Network. Further analysis verifies the importance of embedding propagation for learning better user and item representations, justifying the rationality and effectiveness of NGCF. Codes are available at https://github.com/xiangwang1223/neural_graph_collaborative_filtering.Comment: SIGIR 2019; the latest version of NGCF paper, which is distinct from the version published in ACM Digital Librar