Modeling user preference dynamics with coupled tensor factorization for social media recommendation

An essential problem in real-world recommender systems is that user preferences are not static and users are likely to change their preferences over time. Recent studies have shown that the modelling and capturing the dynamics of user preferences lead to significant improvements on recommendation accuracy and, consequently, user satisfaction. In this paper, we develop a framework to capture user preference dynamics in a personalized manner based on the fact that changes in user preferences can vary individually. We also consider the plausible assumption that older user activities should have less influence on a user’s current preferences. We introduce an individual time decay factor for each user according to the rate of his preference dynamics to weigh the past user preferences and decrease their importance gradually. We exploit users’ demographics as well as the extracted similarities among users over time, aiming to enhance the prior knowledge about user preference dynamics, in addition to the past weighted user preferences in a developed coupled tensor factorization technique to provide top-K recommendations. The experimental results on the two real social media datasets—Last.fm and Movielens—indicate that our proposed model is better and more robust than other competitive methods in terms of recommendation accuracy and is more capable of coping with problems such as cold-start and data sparsity

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

TSCMF: Temporal and social collective matrix factorization model for recommender systems

In real-world recommender systems, user preferences are dynamic and typically change over time. Capturing the temporal dynamics of user preferences is essential to design an efficient personalized recommender system and has recently attracted significant attention. In this paper, we consider user preferences change individually over time. Moreover, based on the intuition that social influence can affect the users’ preferences in a recommender system, we propose a Temporal and Social CollectiveMatrix Factorization model called TSCMF for recommendation.We jointly factorize the users’ rating information and social trust information in a collective matrix factorization framework by introducing a joint objective function. We model user dynamics into this framework by learning a transition matrix of user preferences between two successive time periods for each individual user. We present an efficient optimization algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent for solving the objective function. The experiments on a real-world dataset illustrate that the proposed model outperforms the competitive methods.Moreover, the complexity analysis demonstrates that the proposed model can be scaled up to large datasets

Collaborative Deep Learning for Recommender Systems

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a successful approach commonly used by many recommender systems. Conventional CF-based methods use the ratings given to items by users as the sole source of information for learning to make recommendation. However, the ratings are often very sparse in many applications, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their recommendation performance. To address this sparsity problem, auxiliary information such as item content information may be utilized. Collaborative topic regression (CTR) is an appealing recent method taking this approach which tightly couples the two components that learn from two different sources of information. Nevertheless, the latent representation learned by CTR may not be very effective when the auxiliary information is very sparse. To address this problem, we generalize recent advances in deep learning from i.i.d. input to non-i.i.d. (CF-based) input and propose in this paper a hierarchical Bayesian model called collaborative deep learning (CDL), which jointly performs deep representation learning for the content information and collaborative filtering for the ratings (feedback) matrix. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different domains show that CDL can significantly advance the state of the art