Joint Geo-Spatial Preference and Pairwise Ranking for Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Recommending users with preferred point-of-interests (POIs) has become an important task for location-based social networks, which facilitates users' urban exploration by helping them filter out unattractive locations. Although the influence of geographical neighborhood has been studied in the rating prediction task (i.e. regression), few work have exploited it to develop a ranking-oriented objective function to improve top-N item recommendations. To solve this task, we conduct a manual inspection on real-world datasets, and find that each individual's traits are likely to cluster around multiple centers. Hence, we propose a co-pairwise ranking model based on the assumption that users prefer to assign higher ranks to the POIs near previously rated ones. The proposed method can learn preference ordering from non-observed rating pairs, and thus can alleviate the sparsity problem of matrix factorization. Evaluation on two publicly available datasets shows that our method performs significantly better than state-of-the-art techniques for the top-N item recommendation task

Neural Collaborative Filtering

In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded immense success on speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the exploration of deep neural networks on recommender systems has received relatively less scrutiny. In this work, we strive to develop techniques based on neural networks to tackle the key problem in recommendation -- collaborative filtering -- on the basis of implicit feedback. Although some recent work has employed deep learning for recommendation, they primarily used it to model auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and acoustic features of musics. When it comes to model the key factor in collaborative filtering -- the interaction between user and item features, they still resorted to matrix factorization and applied an inner product on the latent features of users and items. By replacing the inner product with a neural architecture that can learn an arbitrary function from data, we present a general framework named NCF, short for Neural network-based Collaborative Filtering. NCF is generic and can express and generalize matrix factorization under its framework. To supercharge NCF modelling with non-linearities, we propose to leverage a multi-layer perceptron to learn the user-item interaction function. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show significant improvements of our proposed NCF framework over the state-of-the-art methods. Empirical evidence shows that using deeper layers of neural networks offers better recommendation performance.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

IMPROVING COLLABORATIVE FILTERING RECOMMENDER BY USING MULTI-CRITERIA RATING AND IMPLICIT SOCIAL NETWORKS TO RECOMMEND RESEARCH PAPERS

Research paper recommender systems (RSs) aim to alleviate the information overload of researchers by suggesting relevant and useful papers. The collaborative filtering in the area of recommending research papers can benefit by using richer user feedback data through multi-criteria rating, and by integrating richer social network data into the recommender algorithm. Existing approaches using collaborative filtering or hybrid approaches typically allow only one rating criterion (overall liking) for users to evaluate papers. We conducted a qualitative study using focus group to explore the most important criteria for rating research papers that can be used to control the paper recommendation by enabling users to set the weight for each criterion. We investigated also the effect of using different rating criteria on the user interface design and how the user can control the weight of the criteria. We followed that by a quantitative study using a questionnaire to validate our findings from the focus group and to find if the chosen criteria are domain independent. Combining social network information with collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms has successfully reduced some of the drawbacks of collaborative filtering and increased the accuracy of recommendations. All existing recommendation approaches that combine social network information with collaborative filtering in this domain have used explicit social relations that are initiated by users (e.g. “friendship”, “following”). The results have shown that the recommendations produced using explicit social relations cannot compete with traditional collaborative filtering and suffer from the low user coverage. We argue that the available data in social bookmarking Web sites can be exploited to connect similar users using implicit social connections based on their bookmarking behavior. We explore the implicit social relations between users in social bookmarking Web sites (such as CiteULike and Mendeley), and propose three different implicit social networks to recommend relevant papers to users: readership, co-readership and tag-based implicit social networks. First, for each network, we tested the interest similarities of users who are connected using the proposed implicit social networks and compare them with the interest similarities using two explicit social networks: co-authorship and friendship. We found that the readership implicit social network connects users with more similarities than users who are connected using co-authorship and friendship explicit social networks. Then, we compare the recommendation using three different recommendation approaches and implicit social network alone with the recommendation using implicit and explicit social network. We found that fusing recommendation from implicit and explicit social networks can increase the prediction accuracy, and user coverage. The trade-off between the prediction accuracy and diversity was also studied with different social distances between users. The results showed that the diversity of the recommended list increases with the increase of social distance. To summarize, the main contributions of this dissertation to the area of research paper recommendation are two-fold. It is the first to explore the use of multi-criteria rating for research papers. Secondly, it proposes and evaluates a novel approach to improve collaborative filtering in both prediction accuracy (performance) and user coverage and diversity (nonperformance measures) in social bookmarking systems for sharing research papers, by defining and exploiting several implicit social networks from usage data that is widely available

Signed Distance-based Deep Memory Recommender

Personalized recommendation algorithms learn a user's preference for an item by measuring a distance/similarity between them. However, some of the existing recommendation models (e.g., matrix factorization) assume a linear relationship between the user and item. This approach limits the capacity of recommender systems, since the interactions between users and items in real-world applications are much more complex than the linear relationship. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we design and propose a deep learning framework called Signed Distance-based Deep Memory Recommender, which captures non-linear relationships between users and items explicitly and implicitly, and work well in both general recommendation task and shopping basket-based recommendation task. Through an extensive empirical study on six real-world datasets in the two recommendation tasks, our proposed approach achieved significant improvement over ten state-of-the-art recommendation models