FARS: Fuzzy Ant based Recommender System for Web Users

Recommender systems are useful tools which provide an adaptive web environment for web users. Nowadays, having a user friendly website is a big challenge in e-commerce technology. In this paper, applying the benefits of both collaborative and content based filtering techniques is proposed by presenting a fuzzy recommender system based on collaborative behavior of ants (FARS). FARS works in two phases: modeling and recommendation. First, user’s behaviors are modeled offline and the results are used in second phase for online recommendation. Fuzzy techniques provide the possibility of capturing uncertainty among user interests and ant based algorithms provides us with optimal solutions. The performance of FARS is evaluated using log files of “Information and Communication Technology Center” of Isfahan municipality in Iran and compared with ant based recommender system (ARS). The results shown are promising and proved that integrating fuzzy Ant approach provides us with more functional and robust recommendations

Recommendation Systems Based on Association Rule Mining for a Target Object by Evolutionary Algorithms

Recommender systems are designed for offering products to the potential customers. Collaborative Filtering is known as a common way in Recommender systems which offers recommendations made by similar users in the case of entering time and previous transactions. Low accuracy of suggestions due to a database is one of the main concerns about collaborative filtering recommender systems. In this field, numerous researches have been done using associative rules for recommendation systems to improve accuracy but runtime of rule-based recommendation systems is high and cannot be used in the real world. So, many researchers suggest using evolutionary algorithms for finding relative best rules at runtime very fast. The present study investigated the works done for producing associative rules with higher speed and quality. In the first step Apriori-based algorithm will be introduced which is used for recommendation systems and then the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm will be described and the issues of these 2 work will be discussed. Studying this research could help to know the issues in this research field and produce suggestions which have higher speed and quality

Extraction of User Navigation Pattern Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

With current projections regarding the growth of Internet sales, online retailing raises many questions about how to market on the Net. A Recommender System (RS) is a composition of software tools that provides valuable piece of advice for items or services chosen by a user. Recommender systems are currently useful in both the research and in the commercial areas. Recommender systems are a means of personalizing a site and a solution to the customer?s information overload problem. Recommender Systems (RS) are software tools and techniques providing suggestions for items and/or services to be of use to a user. These systems are achieving widespread success in e-commerce applications nowadays, with the advent of internet. This paper presents a categorical review of the field of recommender systems and describes the state-of-the-art of the recommendation methods that are usually classified into four categories: Content based Collaborative, Demographic and Hybrid systems. To build our recommender system we will use fuzzy logic and Markov chain algorithm

A Particle Swarm Approach to Collaborative Filtering based Recommender Systems through Fuzzy Features

AbstractCollaborative filtering (CF) either memory based or model based, has been emerged as an information filtering tool that provides effective recommendations to users utilizing the experiences and opinions of their similar neighbors when they interact with large information spaces. Memory based CF is more accurate than model based CF but it is less scalable. Our work in this paper is an attempt towards introducing a recommendation strategy (FPSO-CF) based on user hybrid features that retains the accuracy of memory – based CF as well as the scalability of model-based CF in an efficient manner. Since most user features are imprecise in nature, therefore these can be represented more naturally by using fuzzy sets. In this work, we employ particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) to learn user weights on various features and use fuzzy sets for representing user features efficiently. Effectiveness of our proposed RS (FPSO-CF) is demonstrated through experimental results in terms of various performance measures using the MovieLens dataset

Adaptive Latent Factor Analysis via Generalized Momentum-Incorporated Particle Swarm Optimization

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is an effective learning strategy to build a latent factor analysis (LFA) model on a high-dimensional and incomplete (HDI) matrix. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is commonly adopted to make an SGD-based LFA model's hyper-parameters, i.e, learning rate and regularization coefficient, self-adaptation. However, a standard PSO algorithm may suffer from accuracy loss caused by premature convergence. To address this issue, this paper incorporates more historical information into each particle's evolutionary process for avoiding premature convergence following the principle of a generalized-momentum (GM) method, thereby innovatively achieving a novel GM-incorporated PSO (GM-PSO). With it, a GM-PSO-based LFA (GMPL) model is further achieved to implement efficient self-adaptation of hyper-parameters. The experimental results on three HDI matrices demonstrate that the GMPL model achieves a higher prediction accuracy for missing data estimation in industrial applications

Binary Particle Swarm Optimization based Biclustering of Web usage Data

Web mining is the nontrivial process to discover valid, novel, potentially useful knowledge from web data using the data mining techniques or methods. It may give information that is useful for improving the services offered by web portals and information access and retrieval tools. With the rapid development of biclustering, more researchers have applied the biclustering technique to different fields in recent years. When biclustering approach is applied to the web usage data it automatically captures the hidden browsing patterns from it in the form of biclusters. In this work, swarm intelligent technique is combined with biclustering approach to propose an algorithm called Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) based Biclustering for Web Usage Data. The main objective of this algorithm is to retrieve the global optimal bicluster from the web usage data. These biclusters contain relationships between web users and web pages which are useful for the E-Commerce applications like web advertising and marketing. Experiments are conducted on real dataset to prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithms

Improving Ant Collaborative Filtering on Sparsity via Dimension Reduction

Recommender systems should be able to handle highly sparse training data that continues to change over time. Among the many solutions, Ant Colony Optimization, as a kind of optimization algorithm modeled on the actions of an ant colony, enjoys the favorable characteristic of being optimal, which has not been easily achieved by other kinds of algorithms. A recent work adopting genetic optimization proposes a collaborative filtering scheme: Ant Collaborative Filtering (ACF), which models the pheromone of ants for a recommender system in two ways: (1) use the pheromone exchange to model the ratings given by users with respect to items; (2) use the evaporation of existing pheromone to model the evolution of users’ preference change over time. This mechanism helps to identify the users and the items most related, even in the case of sparsity, and can capture the drift of user preferences over time. However, it reveals that many users share the same preference over items, which means it is not necessary to initialize each user with a unique type of pheromone, as was done with the ACF. Regarding the sparsity problem, this work takes one step further to improve the Ant Collaborative Filtering’s performance by adding a clustering step in the initialization phase to reduce the dimension of the rate matrix, which leads to the results that K<<#users, where K is the number of clusters, which stands for the maximum number of types of pheromone carried by all users. We call this revised version the Improved Ant Collaborative Filtering (IACF). Experiments are conducted on larger datasets, compared with the previous work, based on three typical recommender systems: (1) movie recommendations, (2) music recommendations, and (3) book recommendations. For movie recommendation, a larger dataset, MoviesLens 10M, was used, instead of MoviesLens 1M. For book recommendation and music recommendation, we used a new dataset that has a much larger size of samples from Douban and NetEase. The results illustrate that our IACF algorithm can better deal with practical recommendation scenarios that handle sparse dataset

A Nonlinear PID-Enhanced Adaptive Latent Factor Analysis Model

High-dimensional and incomplete (HDI) data holds tremendous interactive information in various industrial applications. A latent factor (LF) model is remarkably effective in extracting valuable information from HDI data with stochastic gradient decent (SGD) algorithm. However, an SGD-based LFA model suffers from slow convergence since it only considers the current learning error. To address this critical issue, this paper proposes a Nonlinear PID-enhanced Adaptive Latent Factor (NPALF) model with two-fold ideas: 1) rebuilding the learning error via considering the past learning errors following the principle of a nonlinear PID controller; b) implementing all parameters adaptation effectively following the principle of a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Experience results on four representative HDI datasets indicate that compared with five state-of-the-art LFA models, the NPALF model achieves better convergence rate and prediction accuracy for missing data of an HDI data