Exploiting past users’ interests and predictions in an active learning method for dealing with cold start in recommender systems

This paper focuses on the new users cold-start issue in the context of recommender systems. New users who do not receive pertinent recommendations may abandon the system. In order to cope with this issue, we use active learning techniques. These methods engage the new users to interact with the system by presenting them with a questionnaire that aims to understand their preferences to the related items. In this paper, we propose an active learning technique that exploits past users’ interests and past users’ predictions in order to identify the best questions to ask. Our technique achieves a better performance in terms of precision (RMSE), which leads to learn the users’ preferences in less questions. The experimentations were carried out in a small and public dataset to prove the applicability for handling cold start issues

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

Improved collaborative filtering using clustering and association rule mining on implicit data

The recommender systems are recently becoming more significant due to their ability in making decisions on appropriate choices. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most successful and most applied technique in the design of a recommender system where items to an active user will be recommended based on the past rating records from like-minded users. Unfortunately, CF may lead to poor recommendation when user ratings on items are very sparse (insufficient number of ratings) in comparison with the huge number of users and items in user-item matrix. In the case of a lack of user rating on items, implicit feedback is used to profile a user’s item preferences. Implicit feedback can indicate users’ preferences by providing more evidences and information through observations made on users’ behaviors. Data mining technique, which is the focus of this research, can predict a user’s future behavior without item evaluation and can too, analyze his preferences. In order to investigate the states of research in CF and implicit feedback, a systematic literature review has been conducted on the published studies related to topic areas in CF and implicit feedback. To investigate users’ activities that influence the recommender system developed based on the CF technique, a critical observation on the public recommendation datasets has been carried out. To overcome data sparsity problem, this research applies users’ implicit interaction records with items to efficiently process massive data by employing association rules mining (Apriori algorithm). It uses item repetition within a transaction as an input for association rules mining, in which can achieve high recommendation accuracy. To do this, a modified preprocessing has been employed to discover similar interest patterns among users. In addition, the clustering technique (Hierarchical clustering) has been used to reduce the size of data and dimensionality of the item space as the performance of association rules mining. Then, similarities between items based on their features have been computed to make recommendations. Experiments have been conducted and the results have been compared with basic CF and other extended version of CF techniques including K-Means Clustering, Hybrid Representation, and Probabilistic Learning by using public dataset, namely, Million Song dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique exhibits improvements of an average of 20% in terms of Precision, Recall and Fmeasure metrics when compared to the basic CF technique. Our technique achieves even better performance (an average of 15% improvement in terms of Precision and Recall metrics) when compared to the other extended version of CF techniques, even when the data is very sparse

Assessing and improving recommender systems to deal with user cold-start problem

Recommender systems are in our everyday life. The recommendation methods have as main purpose to predict preferences for new items based on userŠs past preferences. The research related to this topic seeks among other things to discuss user cold-start problem, which is the challenge of recommending to users with few or no preferences records. One way to address cold-start issues is to infer the missing data relying on side information. Side information of different types has been explored in researches. Some studies use social information combined with usersŠ preferences, others user click behavior, location-based information, userŠs visual perception, contextual information, etc. The typical approach is to use side information to build one prediction model for each cold user. Due to the inherent complexity of this prediction process, for full cold-start user in particular, the performance of most recommender systems falls a great deal. We, rather, propose that cold users are best served by models already built in system. In this thesis we propose 4 approaches to deal with user cold-start problem using existing models available for analysis in the recommender systems. We cover the follow aspects: o Embedding social information into traditional recommender systems: We investigate the role of several social metrics on pairwise preference recommendations and provide the Ąrst steps towards a general framework to incorporate social information in traditional approaches. o Improving recommendation with visual perception similarities: We extract networks connecting users with similar visual perception and use them to come up with prediction models that maximize the information gained from cold users. o Analyzing the beneĄts of general framework to incorporate networked information into recommender systems: Representing different types of side information as a user network, we investigated how to incorporate networked information into recommender systems to understand the beneĄts of it in the context of cold user recommendation. o Analyzing the impact of prediction model selection for cold users: The last proposal consider that without side information the system will recommend to cold users based on the switch of models already built in system. We evaluated the proposed approaches in terms of prediction quality and ranking quality in real-world datasets under different recommendation domains. The experiments showed that our approaches achieve better results than the comparison methods.Tese (Doutorado)Sistemas de recomendação fazem parte do nosso dia-a-dia. Os métodos usados nesses sistemas tem como objetivo principal predizer as preferências por novos itens baseado no perĄl do usuário. As pesquisas relacionadas a esse tópico procuram entre outras coisas tratar o problema do cold-start do usuário, que é o desaĄo de recomendar itens para usuários que possuem poucos ou nenhum registro de preferências no sistema. Uma forma de tratar o cold-start do usuário é buscar inferir as preferências dos usuários a partir de informações adicionais. Dessa forma, informações adicionais de diferentes tipos podem ser exploradas nas pesquisas. Alguns estudos usam informação social combinada com preferências dos usuários, outros se baseiam nos clicks ao navegar por sites Web, informação de localização geográĄca, percepção visual, informação de contexto, etc. A abordagem típica desses sistemas é usar informação adicional para construir um modelo de predição para cada usuário. Além desse processo ser mais complexo, para usuários full cold-start (sem preferências identiĄcadas pelo sistema) em particular, a maioria dos sistemas de recomendação apresentam um baixo desempenho. O trabalho aqui apresentado, por outro lado, propõe que novos usuários receberão recomendações mais acuradas de modelos de predição que já existem no sistema. Nesta tese foram propostas 4 abordagens para lidar com o problema de cold-start do usuário usando modelos existentes nos sistemas de recomendação. As abordagens apresentadas trataram os seguintes aspectos: o Inclusão de informação social em sistemas de recomendação tradicional: foram investigados os papéis de várias métricas sociais em um sistema de recomendação de preferências pairwise fornecendo subsidíos para a deĄnição de um framework geral para incluir informação social em abordagens tradicionais. o Uso de similaridade por percepção visual: usando a similaridade por percepção visual foram inferidas redes, conectando usuários similares, para serem usadas na seleção de modelos de predição para novos usuários. o Análise dos benefícios de um framework geral para incluir informação de redes de usuários em sistemas de recomendação: representando diferentes tipos de informação adicional como uma rede de usuários, foi investigado como as redes de usuários podem ser incluídas nos sistemas de recomendação de maneira a beneĄciar a recomendação para usuários cold-start. o Análise do impacto da seleção de modelos de predição para usuários cold-start: a última abordagem proposta considerou que sem a informação adicional o sistema poderia recomendar para novos usuários fazendo a troca entre os modelos já existentes no sistema e procurando aprender qual seria o mais adequado para a recomendação. As abordagens propostas foram avaliadas em termos da qualidade da predição e da qualidade do ranking em banco de dados reais e de diferentes domínios. Os resultados obtidos demonstraram que as abordagens propostas atingiram melhores resultados que os métodos do estado da arte