5,963 research outputs found
Learning Usersā Interests in a Market-Based Recommender System
Recommender systems are widely used to cope with the problem of information overload and, consequently, many recommendation methods have been developed. However, no one technique is best for all users in all situations. To combat this, we have previously developed a market-based recommender system that allows multiple agents (each representing a different recommendation method or system) to compete with one another to present their best recommendations to the user. Our marketplace thus coordinates multiple recommender agents and ensures only the best recommendations are presented. To do this effectively, however, each agent needs to learn the usersā interests and adapt its recommending behaviour accordingly. To this end, in this paper, we develop a reinforcement learning and Boltzmann exploration strategy that the recommender agents can use for these tasks. We then demonstrate that this strategy helps the agents to effectively obtain information about the usersā interests which, in turn, speeds up the market convergence and enables the system to rapidly highlight the best recommendations
Learning users' interests by quality classification in market-based recommender systems
Recommender systems are widely used to cope with the problem of information overload and, to date, many recommendation methods have been developed. However, no one technique is best for all users in all situations. To combat this, we have previously developed a market-based recommender system that allows multiple agents (each representing a different recommendation method or system) to compete with one another to present their best recommendations to the user. In our system, the marketplace encourages good recommendations by rewarding the corresponding agents who supplied them according to the usersā ratings of their suggestions. Moreover, we have theoretically shown how our system incentivises the agents to bid in a manner that ensures only the best recommendations are presented. To do this effectively in practice, however, each agent needs to be able to classify its recommendations into different internal quality levels, learn the usersā interests for these different levels, and then adapt its bidding behaviour for the various levels accordingly. To this end, in this paper we develop a reinforcement learning and Boltzmann exploration strategy that the recommending agents can exploit for these tasks. We then demonstrate that this strategy does indeed help the agents to effectively obtain information about the usersā interests which, in turn, speeds up the market convergence and enables the system to rapidly highlight the best recommendations
User evaluation of a market-based recommender system
Recommender systems have been developed for a wide variety of applications (ranging from books, to holidays, to web pages). These systems have used a number of different approaches, since no one technique is best for all users in all situations. Given this, we believe that to be effective, systems should incorporate a wide variety of such techniques and then some form of overarching framework should be put in place to coordinate them so that only the best recommendations (from whatever source) are presented to the user. To this end, in our previous work, we detailed a market-based approach in which various recommender agents competed with one another to present their recommendations to the user. We showed through theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation with simulated users that an appropriately designed marketplace should be able to provide effective coordination. Building on this, we now report on the development of this multi-agent system and its evaluation with real users. Specifically, we show that our system is capable of consistently giving high quality recommendations, that the best recommendations that could be put forward are actually put forward, and that the combination of recommenders performs better than any constituent recommende
Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products
Major academic publishers need to be able to analyse their vast catalogue of products and select the best items to be marketed in scientific venues. This is a complex exercise that requires characterising with a high precision the topics of thousands of books and matching them with the interests of the relevant communities. In Springer Nature, this task has been traditionally handled manually by publishing editors. However, the rapid growth in the number of scientific publications and the dynamic nature of the Computer Science landscape has made this solution increasingly inefficient. We have addressed this issue by creating Smart Book Recommender (SBR), an ontology-based recommender system developed by The Open University (OU) in collaboration with Springer Nature, which supports their Computer Science editorial team in selecting the products to market at specific venues. SBR recommends books, journals, and conference proceedings relevant to a conference by taking advantage of a semantically enhanced representation of about 27K editorial products. This is based on the Computer Science Ontology, a very large-scale, automatically generated taxonomy of research areas. SBR also allows users to investigate why a certain publication was suggested by the system. It does so by means of an interactive graph view that displays the topic taxonomy of the recommended editorial product and compares it with the topic-centric characterization of the input conference. An evaluation carried out with seven Springer Nature editors and seven OU researchers has confirmed the effectiveness of the solution
Beyond Personalization: Research Directions in Multistakeholder Recommendation
Recommender systems are personalized information access applications; they
are ubiquitous in today's online environment, and effective at finding items
that meet user needs and tastes. As the reach of recommender systems has
extended, it has become apparent that the single-minded focus on the user
common to academic research has obscured other important aspects of
recommendation outcomes. Properties such as fairness, balance, profitability,
and reciprocity are not captured by typical metrics for recommender system
evaluation. The concept of multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a
unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings
where the end user is not the sole focus. This article describes the origins of
multistakeholder recommendation, and the landscape of system designs. It
provides illustrative examples of current research, as well as outlining open
questions and research directions for the field.Comment: 64 page
PrivateJobMatch: A Privacy-Oriented Deferred Multi-Match Recommender System for Stable Employment
Coordination failure reduces match quality among employers and candidates in
the job market, resulting in a large number of unfilled positions and/or
unstable, short-term employment. Centralized job search engines provide a
platform that connects directly employers with job-seekers. However, they
require users to disclose a significant amount of personal data, i.e., build a
user profile, in order to provide meaningful recommendations. In this paper, we
present PrivateJobMatch -- a privacy-oriented deferred multi-match recommender
system -- which generates stable pairings while requiring users to provide only
a partial ranking of their preferences. PrivateJobMatch explores a series of
adaptations of the game-theoretic Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance algorithm
which combine the flexibility of decentralized markets with the intelligence of
centralized matching. We identify the shortcomings of the original algorithm
when applied to a job market and propose novel solutions that rely on machine
learning techniques. Experimental results on real and synthetic data confirm
the benefits of the proposed algorithms across several quality measures. Over
the past year, we have implemented a PrivateJobMatch prototype and deployed it
in an active job market economy. Using the gathered real-user preference data,
we find that the match-recommendations are superior to a typical decentralized
job market---while requiring only a partial ranking of the user preferences.Comment: 45 pages, 28 figures, RecSys 201
Generating ordered list of Recommended Items: a Hybrid Recommender System of Microblog
Precise recommendation of followers helps in improving the user experience
and maintaining the prosperity of twitter and microblog platforms. In this
paper, we design a hybrid recommender system of microblog as a solution of KDD
Cup 2012, track 1 task, which requires predicting users a user might follow in
Tencent Microblog. We describe the background of the problem and present the
algorithm consisting of keyword analysis, user taxonomy, (potential)interests
extraction and item recommendation. Experimental result shows the high
performance of our algorithm. Some possible improvements are discussed, which
leads to further study.Comment: 7 page
NEXT LEVEL: A COURSE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM BASED ON CAREER INTERESTS
Skills-based hiring is a talent management approach that empowers employers to align recruitment around business results, rather than around credentials and title. It starts with employers identifying the particular skills required for a role, and then screening and evaluating candidatesā competencies against those requirements. With the recent rise in employers adopting skills-based hiring practices, it has become integral for students to take courses that improve their marketability and support their long-term career success. A 2017 survey of over 32,000 students at 43 randomly selected institutions found that only 34% of students believe they will graduate with the skills and knowledge required to be successful in the job market. Furthermore, the study found that while 96% of chief academic officers believe that their institutions are very or somewhat effective at preparing students for the workforce, only 11% of business leaders strongly agree [11]. An implication of the misalignment is that college graduates lack the skills that companies need and value. Fortunately, the rise of skills-based hiring provides an opportunity for universities and students to establish and follow clearer classroom-to-career pathways. To this end, this paper presents a course recommender system that aims to improve studentsā career readiness by suggesting relevant skills and courses based on their unique career interests
Deep recommender engine based on efficient product embeddings neural pipeline
Predictive analytics systems are currently one of the most important areas of
research and development within the Artificial Intelligence domain and
particularly in Machine Learning. One of the "holy grails" of predictive
analytics is the research and development of the "perfect" recommendation
system. In our paper, we propose an advanced pipeline model for the multi-task
objective of determining product complementarity, similarity and sales
prediction using deep neural models applied to big-data sequential transaction
systems. Our highly parallelized hybrid model pipeline consists of both
unsupervised and supervised models, used for the objectives of generating
semantic product embeddings and predicting sales, respectively. Our
experimentation and benchmarking processes have been done using pharma industry
retail real-life transactional Big-Data streams.Comment: 2018 17th RoEduNet Conference: Networking in Education and Research
(RoEduNet
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