A Graphical Model Formulation of Collaborative Filtering Neighbourhood Methods with Fast Maximum Entropy Training

Item neighbourhood methods for collaborative filtering learn a weighted graph over the set of items, where each item is connected to those it is most similar to. The prediction of a user's rating on an item is then given by that rating of neighbouring items, weighted by their similarity. This paper presents a new neighbourhood approach which we call item fields, whereby an undirected graphical model is formed over the item graph. The resulting prediction rule is a simple generalization of the classical approaches, which takes into account non-local information in the graph, allowing its best results to be obtained when using drastically fewer edges than other neighbourhood approaches. A fast approximate maximum entropy training method based on the Bethe approximation is presented, which uses a simple gradient ascent procedure. When using precomputed sufficient statistics on the Movielens datasets, our method is faster than maximum likelihood approaches by two orders of magnitude.Comment: ICML201

Peer-to-Peer Secure Multi-Party Numerical Computation Facing Malicious Adversaries

We propose an efficient framework for enabling secure multi-party numerical computations in a Peer-to-Peer network. This problem arises in a range of applications such as collaborative filtering, distributed computation of trust and reputation, monitoring and other tasks, where the computing nodes is expected to preserve the privacy of their inputs while performing a joint computation of a certain function. Although there is a rich literature in the field of distributed systems security concerning secure multi-party computation, in practice it is hard to deploy those methods in very large scale Peer-to-Peer networks. In this work, we try to bridge the gap between theoretical algorithms in the security domain, and a practical Peer-to-Peer deployment. We consider two security models. The first is the semi-honest model where peers correctly follow the protocol, but try to reveal private information. We provide three possible schemes for secure multi-party numerical computation for this model and identify a single light-weight scheme which outperforms the others. Using extensive simulation results over real Internet topologies, we demonstrate that our scheme is scalable to very large networks, with up to millions of nodes. The second model we consider is the malicious peers model, where peers can behave arbitrarily, deliberately trying to affect the results of the computation as well as compromising the privacy of other peers. For this model we provide a fourth scheme to defend the execution of the computation against the malicious peers. The proposed scheme has a higher complexity relative to the semi-honest model. Overall, we provide the Peer-to-Peer network designer a set of tools to choose from, based on the desired level of security.Comment: Submitted to Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications Journal (PPNA) 200

Addressing Item-Cold Start Problem in Recommendation Systems using Model Based Approach and Deep Learning

Traditional recommendation systems rely on past usage data in order to generate new recommendations. Those approaches fail to generate sensible recommendations for new users and items into the system due to missing information about their past interactions. In this paper, we propose a solution for successfully addressing item-cold start problem which uses model-based approach and recent advances in deep learning. In particular, we use latent factor model for recommendation, and predict the latent factors from item's descriptions using convolutional neural network when they cannot be obtained from usage data. Latent factors obtained by applying matrix factorization to the available usage data are used as ground truth to train the convolutional neural network. To create latent factor representations for the new items, the convolutional neural network uses their textual description. The results from the experiments reveal that the proposed approach significantly outperforms several baseline estimators

A Probabilistic Model for the Cold-Start Problem in Rating Prediction using Click Data

One of the most efficient methods in collaborative filtering is matrix factorization, which finds the latent vector representations of users and items based on the ratings of users to items. However, a matrix factorization based algorithm suffers from the cold-start problem: it cannot find latent vectors for items to which previous ratings are not available. This paper utilizes click data, which can be collected in abundance, to address the cold-start problem. We propose a probabilistic item embedding model that learns item representations from click data, and a model named EMB-MF, that connects it with a probabilistic matrix factorization for rating prediction. The experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is not only effective in recommending items with no previous ratings, but also outperforms competing methods, especially when the data is very sparse.Comment: ICONIP 201

An empirical comparison of collaborative filtering approaches on netflix data

Recommender systems are widely used in E-Commerce for making automatic suggestions of new items that could meet the interest of a given user. Collaborative Filtering approaches compute recommendations by assuming that users, who have shown similar behavior in the past, will share a common behavior in the future. According to this assumption, the most effective collaborative filtering techniques try to discover groups of similar users in order to infer the preferences of the group members. The purpose of this work is to show an empirical comparison of the main collaborative filtering approaches, namely Baseline, Nearest Neighbors, Latent Factor and Probabilistic models, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses. Data used for the analysis are a sample of the well-known Netix Prize database. Copyright owned by the authors

Implementasi dan Analisis Online – Updating Regularized Kernel Matrix Factorization Model pada Sistem Rekomendasi

Faktorisasi Matriks adalah salah satu metode yang digunakan pada Sistem Rekomendasi untuk membuat sebuah model prediksi rating. Salah satu jenisnya adalah Regularized Matriks Factorization yang mampu memberikan kualitas rekomendasi yang tinggi pada sebuah sistem rekomendasi. Akan tetapi, teknik - teknik Faktorisasi Matriks bermasalah jika model pada sistem rekomendasi berupa model yang statik. Permasalahan performansi terjadi, karena proses Learning data pada Faktorisasi Matriks membutuhkan waktu yang lama. Model Online dari Faktorisasi Matriks merupakan hal yang dapat memperbaiki model sebelumnya, dengan model Online, waktu yang dibutuhkan untuk melakukan proses prediksi untuk User dan Item yang baru, lebih cepat dibandingkan dengan model Offline faktorisasi matriks. Penelitian ini berfokus dalam menganalisis dan mengimplementasikan model Online dari Regularized Matriks Factorization pada sebuah sistem rekomendasi film. Hasil yang diperoleh adalah kualitas prediksi rating dengan metode Online Updating RKMF mengungguli kualitas prediksi rating dengan metode Full Retrain RKMF dengan perbedaan nilai RMSE sebesar 1.5% pada kondisi terburuk, dan dengan waktu prediksi yang sangat singkat. Keyword : faktorisasi matriks, Online Updating, recommender performanc