3,322 research outputs found
Location-aware online learning for top-k recommendation
We address the problem of recommending highly volatile items for users, both with potentially ambiguous location that may change in time. The three main ingredients of our method include (1) using online machine learning for the highly volatile items; (2) learning the personalized importance of hierarchical geolocation (for example, town, region, country, continent); finally (3) modeling temporal relevance by counting recent items with an exponential decay in recency.For (1), we consider a time-aware setting, where evaluation is cumbersome by traditional measures since we have different top recommendations at different times. We describe a time-aware framework based on individual item discounted gain. For (2), we observe that trends and geolocation turns out to be more important than personalized user preferences: user-item and content-item matrix factorization improves in combination with our geo-trend learning methods, but in itself, they are greatly inferior to our location based models. In fact, since our best performing methods are based on spatiotemporal data, they are applicable in the user cold start setting as well and perform even better than content based cold start methods. Finally for (3), we estimate the probability that the item will be viewed by its previous views to obtain a powerful model that combines item popularity and recency.To generate realistic data for measuring our new methods, we rely on Twitter messages with known GPS location and consider hashtags as items that we recommend the users to be included in their next message. © 2016 Elsevier B.V
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
Tensor Learning for Recovering Missing Information: Algorithms and Applications on Social Media
Real-time social systems like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat have been growing
rapidly, producing exabytes of data in different views or aspects. Coupled with more
and more GPS-enabled sharing of videos, images, blogs, and tweets that provide valuable
information regarding “who”, “where”, “when” and “what”, these real-time human
sensor data promise new research opportunities to uncover models of user behavior, mobility,
and information sharing. These real-time dynamics in social systems usually come
in multiple aspects, which are able to help better understand the social interactions of the
underlying network. However, these multi-aspect datasets are often raw and incomplete
owing to various unpredictable or unavoidable reasons; for instance, API limitations and
data sampling policies can lead to an incomplete (and often biased) perspective on these
multi-aspect datasets. This missing data could raise serious concerns such as biased estimations
on structural properties of the network and properties of information cascades in
social networks. In order to recover missing values or information in social systems, we
identify “4S” challenges: extreme sparsity of the observed multi-aspect datasets, adoption
of rich side information that is able to describe the similarities of entities, generation of
robust models rather than limiting them on specific applications, and scalability of models
to handle real large-scale datasets (billions of observed entries). With these challenges
in mind, this dissertation aims to develop scalable and interpretable tensor-based frameworks,
algorithms and methods for recovering missing information on social media. In
particular, this dissertation research makes four unique contributions:
_ The first research contribution of this dissertation research is to propose a scalable
framework based on low-rank tensor learning in the presence of incomplete information.
Concretely, we formally define the problem of recovering the spatio-temporal dynamics of online memes and tackle this problem by proposing a novel tensor-based
factorization approach based on the alternative direction method of multipliers
(ADMM) with the integration of the latent relationships derived from contextual
information among locations, memes, and times.
_ The second research contribution of this dissertation research is to evaluate the generalization
of the proposed tensor learning framework and extend it to the recommendation
problem. In particular, we develop a novel tensor-based approach to
solve the personalized expert recommendation by integrating both the latent relationships
between homogeneous entities (e.g., users and users, experts and experts)
and the relationships between heterogeneous entities (e.g., users and experts, topics
and experts) from the geo-spatial, topical, and social contexts.
_ The third research contribution of this dissertation research is to extend the proposed
tensor learning framework to the user topical profiling problem. Specifically,
we propose a tensor-based contextual regularization model embedded into a matrix
factorization framework, which leverages the social, textual, and behavioral contexts
across users, in order to overcome identified challenges.
_ The fourth research contribution of this dissertation research is to scale up the proposed
tensor learning framework to be capable of handling real large-scale datasets
that are too big to fit in the main memory of a single machine. Particularly, we
propose a novel distributed tensor completion algorithm with the trace-based regularization
of the auxiliary information based on ADMM under the proposed tensor
learning framework, which is designed to scale up to real large-scale tensors (e.g.,
billions of entries) by efficiently computing auxiliary variables, minimizing intermediate
data, and reducing the workload of updating new tensors
Personalized Expert Recommendation: Models and Algorithms
Many large-scale information sharing systems including social media systems, questionanswering
sites and rating and reviewing applications have been growing rapidly, allowing
millions of human participants to generate and consume information on an unprecedented
scale. To manage the sheer growth of information generation, there comes the need to enable
personalization of information resources for users — to surface high-quality content
and feeds, to provide personally relevant suggestions, and so on. A fundamental task in
creating and supporting user-centered personalization systems is to build rich user profile
to aid recommendation for better user experience.
Therefore, in this dissertation research, we propose models and algorithms to facilitate
the creation of new crowd-powered personalized information sharing systems. Specifically,
we first give a principled framework to enable personalization of resources so that
information seekers can be matched with customized knowledgeable users based on their
previous historical actions and contextual information; We then focus on creating rich
user models that allows accurate and comprehensive modeling of user profiles for long
tail users, including discovering user’s known-for profile, user’s opinion bias and user’s
geo-topic profile. In particular, this dissertation research makes two unique contributions:
First, we introduce the problem of personalized expert recommendation and propose
the first principled framework for addressing this problem. To overcome the sparsity issue,
we investigate the use of user’s contextual information that can be exploited to build robust
models of personal expertise, study how spatial preference for personally-valuable expertise
varies across regions, across topics and based on different underlying social communities,
and integrate these different forms of preferences into a matrix factorization-based
personalized expert recommender.
Second, to support the personalized recommendation on experts, we focus on modeling
and inferring user profiles in online information sharing systems. In order to tap
the knowledge of most majority of users, we provide frameworks and algorithms to accurately
and comprehensively create user models by discovering user’s known-for profile,
user’s opinion bias and user’s geo-topic profile, with each described shortly as follows:
—We develop a probabilistic model called Bayesian Contextual Poisson Factorization
to discover what users are known for by others. Our model considers as input a small fraction
of users whose known-for profiles are already known and the vast majority of users for
whom we have little (or no) information, learns the implicit relationships between user?s
known-for profiles and their contextual signals, and finally predict known-for profiles for
those majority of users.
—We explore user’s topic-sensitive opinion bias, propose a lightweight semi-supervised
system called “BiasWatch” to semi-automatically infer the opinion bias of long-tail users,
and demonstrate how user’s opinion bias can be exploited to recommend other users with
similar opinion in social networks.
— We study how a user’s topical profile varies geo-spatially and how we can model
a user’s geo-spatial known-for profile as the last step in our dissertation for creation of
rich user profile. We propose a multi-layered Bayesian hierarchical user factorization to
overcome user heterogeneity and an enhanced model to alleviate the sparsity issue by integrating
user contexts into the two-layered hierarchical user model for better representation
of user’s geo-topic preference by others
- …