58 research outputs found
Incorporating Constraints into Matrix Factorization for Clothes Package Recommendation
Recommender systems have been widely applied in the literature to suggest individual items to users. In this paper, we consider the harder problem of package recommendation, where items are recommended together as a package. We focus on the clothing domain, where a package recommendation involves a combination of a "top'' (e.g. a shirt) and a "bottom'' (e.g. a pair of trousers). The novelty in this work is that we combined matrix factorisation methods for collaborative filtering with hand-crafted and learnt fashion constraints on combining item features such as colour, formality and patterns. Finally, to better understand where the algorithms are underperforming, we conducted focus groups, which lead to deeper insights into how to use constraints to improve package recommendation in this domain
Exploring explanations for matrix factorization recommender systems (Position Paper)
In this paper we address the problem of finding explanations for collaborative filtering algorithms that use matrix factorization methods. We look for explanations that increase the transparency of the system. To do so, we propose two measures. First, we show a model that describes the contribution of each previous rating given by a user to the generated recommendation. Second, we measure then influence of changing each previous rating of a user on the outcome of the recommender system. We show that under the assumption that there are many more users in the system than there are items, we can efficiently generate each type of explanation by using linear approximations of the recommender system’s behavior for each user, and computing partial derivatives of predicted ratings with respect to each user’s provided ratings.http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/fatrec/2017/1/7/Published versio
How to Perform Reproducible Experiments in the ELLIOT Recommendation Framework: Data Processing, Model Selection, and Performance Evaluation
Recommender Systems have shown to be an efective way to alleviate the over-choice problem and provide
accurate and tailored recommendations. However, the impressive number of proposed recommendation
algorithms, splitting strategies, evaluation protocols, metrics, and tasks, has made rigorous experimental
evaluation particularly challenging. ELLIOT is a comprehensive recommendation framework that aims
to run and reproduce an entire experimental pipeline by processing a simple confguration fle. The
framework loads, flters, and splits the data considering a vast set of strategies. Then, it optimizes
hyperparameters for several recommendation algorithms, selects the best models, compares them with
the baselines, computes metrics spanning from accuracy to beyond-accuracy, bias, and fairness, and
conducts statistical analysis. The aim is to provide researchers a tool to ease all the experimental
evaluation phases (and make them reproducible), from data reading to results collection. ELLIOT is
freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/sisinflab/ellio
Local Popularity and Time in top-N Recommendation
Items popularity is a strong signal in recommendation algorithms. It strongly
affects collaborative filtering approaches and it has been proven to be a very
good baseline in terms of results accuracy. Even though we miss an actual
personalization, global popularity can be effectively used to recommend items
to users. In this paper we introduce the idea of a time-aware personalized
popularity in recommender systems by considering both items popularity among
neighbors and how it changes over time. An experimental evaluation shows a
highly competitive behavior of the proposed approach, compared to state of the
art model-based collaborative approaches, in terms of results accuracy.Comment: ECIR short paper, 7 page
Explaining Latent Factor Models for Recommendation with Influence Functions
Latent factor models (LFMs) such as matrix factorization achieve the
state-of-the-art performance among various Collaborative Filtering (CF)
approaches for recommendation. Despite the high recommendation accuracy of
LFMs, a critical issue to be resolved is the lack of explainability. Extensive
efforts have been made in the literature to incorporate explainability into
LFMs. However, they either rely on auxiliary information which may not be
available in practice, or fail to provide easy-to-understand explanations. In
this paper, we propose a fast influence analysis method named FIA, which
successfully enforces explicit neighbor-style explanations to LFMs with the
technique of influence functions stemmed from robust statistics. We first
describe how to employ influence functions to LFMs to deliver neighbor-style
explanations. Then we develop a novel influence computation algorithm for
matrix factorization with high efficiency. We further extend it to the more
general neural collaborative filtering and introduce an approximation algorithm
to accelerate influence analysis over neural network models. Experimental
results on real datasets demonstrate the correctness, efficiency and usefulness
of our proposed method
Combining mitigation treatments against biases in personalized rankings: Use case on item popularity
Historical interactions leveraged by recommender systems are often non-uniformly distributed across items. Though they are of interest for consumers, certain items end up therefore being biasedly under-recommended. Existing treatments for mitigating these biases act at a single step of the pipeline (either pre-, in-, or post-processing), and it remains unanswered whether simultaneously introducing treatments throughout the pipeline leads to a better mitigation. In this paper, we analyze the impact of bias treatments along the steps of the pipeline under a use case on popularity bias. Experiments show that, with small losses in accuracy, the combination of treatments leads to better trade-offs than treatments applied separately. Our findings call for treatments rooting out bias at different steps simultaneously
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