63,324 research outputs found
Manipulation Robustness of Collaborative Filtering Systems
A collaborative filtering system recommends to users products that
similar users like. Collaborative filtering systems influence purchase
decisions, and hence have become targets of manipulation by unscrupulous
vendors. We provide theoretical and empirical results demonstrating that
while common nearest neighbor algorithms, which are widely used in
commercial systems, can be highly susceptible to manipulation, two
classes of collaborative filtering algorithms which we refer to as
linear and asymptotically linear are relatively robust. These results
provide guidance for the design of future collaborative filtering systems
A Bayesian Approach toward Active Learning for Collaborative Filtering
Collaborative filtering is a useful technique for exploiting the preference
patterns of a group of users to predict the utility of items for the active
user. In general, the performance of collaborative filtering depends on the
number of rated examples given by the active user. The more the number of rated
examples given by the active user, the more accurate the predicted ratings will
be. Active learning provides an effective way to acquire the most informative
rated examples from active users. Previous work on active learning for
collaborative filtering only considers the expected loss function based on the
estimated model, which can be misleading when the estimated model is
inaccurate. This paper takes one step further by taking into account of the
posterior distribution of the estimated model, which results in more robust
active learning algorithm. Empirical studies with datasets of movie ratings
show that when the number of ratings from the active user is restricted to be
small, active learning methods only based on the estimated model don't perform
well while the active learning method using the model distribution achieves
substantially better performance.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twentieth Conference on Uncertainty in
Artificial Intelligence (UAI2004
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
Collaborative recommendations with content-based filters for cultural activities via a scalable event distribution platform
Nowadays, most people have limited leisure time and the offer of (cultural) activities to spend this time is enormous. Consequently, picking the most appropriate events becomes increasingly difficult for end-users. This complexity of choice reinforces the necessity of filtering systems that assist users in finding and selecting relevant events. Whereas traditional filtering tools enable e.g. the use of keyword-based or filtered searches, innovative recommender systems draw on user ratings, preferences, and metadata describing the events. Existing collaborative recommendation techniques, developed for suggesting web-shop products or audio-visual content, have difficulties with sparse rating data and can not cope at all with event-specific restrictions like availability, time, and location. Moreover, aggregating, enriching, and distributing these events are additional requisites for an optimal communication channel. In this paper, we propose a highly-scalable event recommendation platform which considers event-specific characteristics. Personal suggestions are generated by an advanced collaborative filtering algorithm, which is more robust on sparse data by extending user profiles with presumable future consumptions. The events, which are described using an RDF/OWL representation of the EventsML-G2 standard, are categorized and enriched via smart indexing and open linked data sets. This metadata model enables additional content-based filters, which consider event-specific characteristics, on the recommendation list. The integration of these different functionalities is realized by a scalable and extendable bus architecture. Finally, focus group conversations were organized with external experts, cultural mediators, and potential end-users to evaluate the event distribution platform and investigate the possible added value of recommendations for cultural participation
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
ROBUST LOW-RANK MATRIX FACTORIZATION WITH MISSING DATA BY MINIMIZING L1 LOSS APPLIED TO COLLABORATIVE FILTERING
In this age of information overload and plethora of choices, people increasingly rely on automatic recommender systems to tell them what suits their needs. A very effective approach for creating recommender systems is collaborative filtering, which is the task of predicting the preference/rating that a user would assign to an item based on preference data of that user and preference data of other users. One way to conduct collaborative filtering is through dimensionality reduction. The underlying concept of the approach lies in the belief that there are only a few features (reduced dimensions) that influence the user’s choice. In this paper we use low rank matrix factorization for dimensionality reduction. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), which is minimizing the L2 norm is the most popular technique to perform matrix factorization. However, in most recommendation system data sets, often the users only rate a small amount of items, which creates missing data. As a result SVD fails. In recent years L1 norm has gained much importance and popularity because it is robust to outliers and missing data. In this thesis we use alternate convex optimization to perform L1 norm minimization to solve the matrix factorization problem and apply it to collaborative filtering. We also review some of the major challenges that collaborative filtering faces today and some of the other techniques used. Additionally, this thesis discusses the importance and future of collaborative filtering in medical applications that concerns the database of patient history (prescriptions/symptoms) and how it can be used as a predictive task for the future of the patient
Interactive Graph Convolutional Filtering
Interactive Recommender Systems (IRS) have been increasingly used in various
domains, including personalized article recommendation, social media, and
online advertising. However, IRS faces significant challenges in providing
accurate recommendations under limited observations, especially in the context
of interactive collaborative filtering. These problems are exacerbated by the
cold start problem and data sparsity problem. Existing Multi-Armed Bandit
methods, despite their carefully designed exploration strategies, often
struggle to provide satisfactory results in the early stages due to the lack of
interaction data. Furthermore, these methods are computationally intractable
when applied to non-linear models, limiting their applicability. To address
these challenges, we propose a novel method, the Interactive Graph
Convolutional Filtering model. Our proposed method extends interactive
collaborative filtering into the graph model to enhance the performance of
collaborative filtering between users and items. We incorporate variational
inference techniques to overcome the computational hurdles posed by non-linear
models. Furthermore, we employ Bayesian meta-learning methods to effectively
address the cold-start problem and derive theoretical regret bounds for our
proposed method, ensuring a robust performance guarantee. Extensive
experimental results on three real-world datasets validate our method and
demonstrate its superiority over existing baselines
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