Learning Item Trees for Probabilistic Modelling of Implicit Feedback

User preferences for items can be inferred from either explicit feedback, such as item ratings, or implicit feedback, such as rental histories. Research in collaborative filtering has concentrated on explicit feedback, resulting in the development of accurate and scalable models. However, since explicit feedback is often difficult to collect it is important to develop effective models that take advantage of the more widely available implicit feedback. We introduce a probabilistic approach to collaborative filtering with implicit feedback based on modelling the user's item selection process. In the interests of scalability, we restrict our attention to tree-structured distributions over items and develop a principled and efficient algorithm for learning item trees from data. We also identify a problem with a widely used protocol for evaluating implicit feedback models and propose a way of addressing it using a small quantity of explicit feedback data.Comment: 8 page

Exact and efficient top-K inference for multi-target prediction by querying separable linear relational models

Many complex multi-target prediction problems that concern large target spaces are characterised by a need for efficient prediction strategies that avoid the computation of predictions for all targets explicitly. Examples of such problems emerge in several subfields of machine learning, such as collaborative filtering, multi-label classification, dyadic prediction and biological network inference. In this article we analyse efficient and exact algorithms for computing the top-$K$ predictions in the above problem settings, using a general class of models that we refer to as separable linear relational models. We show how to use those inference algorithms, which are modifications of well-known information retrieval methods, in a variety of machine learning settings. Furthermore, we study the possibility of scoring items incompletely, while still retaining an exact top-K retrieval. Experimental results in several application domains reveal that the so-called threshold algorithm is very scalable, performing often many orders of magnitude more efficiently than the naive approach

MACHINE LEARNING AND CAUSALITY FOR INTERPRETABLE AND AUTOMATED DECISION MAKING

This abstract explores two key areas in decision science: automated and interpretable decision making. In the first part, we address challenges related to sparse user interaction data and high item turnover rates in recommender systems. We introduce a novel algorithm called Multi-View Interactive Collaborative Filtering (MV-ICTR) that integrates user-item ratings and contextual information, improving performance, particularly for cold-start scenarios. In the second part, we focus on Student Prescription Trees (SPTs), which are interpretable decision trees. These trees use a black box teacher model to predict counterfactuals based on observed covariates. We experiment with a Bayesian hierarchical binomial regression model as the teacher and employ statistical significance testing to control tree growth, ensuring interpretable decision trees. Overall, our research advances the field of decision science by addressing challenges in automated and interpretable decision making, offering solutions for improved performance and interpretability

DeepCF: A Unified Framework of Representation Learning and Matching Function Learning in Recommender System

In general, recommendation can be viewed as a matching problem, i.e., match proper items for proper users. However, due to the huge semantic gap between users and items, it's almost impossible to directly match users and items in their initial representation spaces. To solve this problem, many methods have been studied, which can be generally categorized into two types, i.e., representation learning-based CF methods and matching function learning-based CF methods. Representation learning-based CF methods try to map users and items into a common representation space. In this case, the higher similarity between a user and an item in that space implies they match better. Matching function learning-based CF methods try to directly learn the complex matching function that maps user-item pairs to matching scores. Although both methods are well developed, they suffer from two fundamental flaws, i.e., the limited expressiveness of dot product and the weakness in capturing low-rank relations respectively. To this end, we propose a general framework named DeepCF, short for Deep Collaborative Filtering, to combine the strengths of the two types of methods and overcome such flaws. Extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DeepCF framework