1,829 research outputs found
Conformative Filtering for Implicit Feedback Data
Implicit feedback is the simplest form of user feedback that can be used for
item recommendation. It is easy to collect and is domain independent. However,
there is a lack of negative examples. Previous work tackles this problem by
assuming that users are not interested or not as much interested in the
unconsumed items. Those assumptions are often severely violated since
non-consumption can be due to factors like unawareness or lack of resources.
Therefore, non-consumption by a user does not always mean disinterest or
irrelevance. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Conformative
Filtering (CoF) to address the issue. The motivating observation is that if
there is a large group of users who share the same taste and none of them have
consumed an item before, then it is likely that the item is not of interest to
the group. We perform multidimensional clustering on implicit feedback data
using hierarchical latent tree analysis (HLTA) to identify user `tastes' groups
and make recommendations for a user based on her memberships in the groups and
on the past behavior of the groups. Experiments on two real-world datasets from
different domains show that CoF has superior performance compared to several
common baselines
Scalable Population Synthesis with Deep Generative Modeling
Population synthesis is concerned with the generation of synthetic yet
realistic representations of populations. It is a fundamental problem in the
modeling of transport where the synthetic populations of micro-agents represent
a key input to most agent-based models. In this paper, a new methodological
framework for how to 'grow' pools of micro-agents is presented. The model
framework adopts a deep generative modeling approach from machine learning
based on a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Compared to the previous population
synthesis approaches, including Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF), Gibbs
sampling and traditional generative models such as Bayesian Networks or Hidden
Markov Models, the proposed method allows fitting the full joint distribution
for high dimensions. The proposed methodology is compared with a conventional
Gibbs sampler and a Bayesian Network by using a large-scale Danish trip diary.
It is shown that, while these two methods outperform the VAE in the
low-dimensional case, they both suffer from scalability issues when the number
of modeled attributes increases. It is also shown that the Gibbs sampler
essentially replicates the agents from the original sample when the required
conditional distributions are estimated as frequency tables. In contrast, the
VAE allows addressing the problem of sampling zeros by generating agents that
are virtually different from those in the original data but have similar
statistical properties. The presented approach can support agent-based modeling
at all levels by enabling richer synthetic populations with smaller zones and
more detailed individual characteristics.Comment: 27 pages, 15 figures, 4 table
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