The design and implementation of composite Collaborative Filtering algorithm for personalized recommendation

A composite collaborative filtering algorithm for personalized recommend will be presented to solve the original Collaborative Filtering algorithm problem including 'None of User Starting' and 'Data Sparsity', and the Spearman rank correlation coefficient will be used as a main correlation coefficient. Top-M commended is going to be used to get the final results in this paper. At last, we will validate that this algorithm is superior to the algorithm of collaborative filtering based on user and the algorithm of collaborative filtering based on item. © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER

Supporting ‘Word-of-Mouth’ Social Networks through Collaborative Information Filtering

Altered Vista is an instructional system that supports a form of ‘contextual’ collaborative learning. Its design incorporates an information filtering technique, called collaborative information filtering, which, through computational and statistical means, leverages the work of individuals to benefit a group of users. Altered Vista is designed to provide, upon request, personalized recommendations of Web sites. It can also provide recommendations of like-minded people, thus setting the stage for future collaboration and communication. An empirical study involving in-service and pre-service teachers was conducted using Altered Vista and presents results from an empirical study. The study examined the feasibility and utility of automating the well-known social feature of propagating word-of-mouth opinions within educational settings. It also examined the impact of Altered Vista’s ability to recommend a social network of potentially unknown people

A new technique for intelligent web personal recommendation

Personal recommendation systems nowadays are very important in web applications because of the available huge volume of information on the World Wide Web, and the necessity to save users’ time, and provide appropriate desired information, knowledge, items, etc. The most popular recommendation systems are collaborative filtering systems, which suffer from certain problems such as cold-start, privacy, user identification, and scalability. In this thesis, we suggest a new method to solve the cold start problem taking into consideration the privacy issue. The method is shown to perform very well in comparison with alternative methods, while having better properties regarding user privacy. The cold start problem covers the situation when recommendation systems have not sufficient information about a new user’s preferences (the user cold start problem), as well as the case of newly added items to the system (the item cold start problem), in which case the system will not be able to provide recommendations. Some systems use users’ demographical data as a basis for generating recommendations in such cases (e.g. the Triadic Aspect method), but this solves only the user cold start problem and enforces user’s privacy. Some systems use users’ ’stereotypes’ to generate recommendations, but stereotypes often do not reflect the actual preferences of individual users. While some other systems use user’s ’filterbots’ by injecting pseudo users or bots into the system and consider these as existing ones, but this leads to poor accuracy. We propose the active node method, that uses previous and recent users’ browsing targets and browsing patterns to infer preferences and generate recommendations (node recommendations, in which a single suggestion is given, and batch recommendations, in which a set of possible target nodes are shown to the user at once). We compare the active node method with three alternative methods (Triadic Aspect Method, Naïve Filterbots Method, and MediaScout Stereotype Method), and we used a dataset collected from online web news to generate recommendations based on our method and based on the three alternative methods. We calculated the levels of novelty, coverage, and precision in these experiments, and we found that our method achieves higher levels of novelty in batch recommendation while achieving higher levels of coverage and precision in node recommendations comparing to these alternative methods. Further, we develop a variant of the active node method that incorporates semantic structure elements. A further experimental evaluation with real data and users showed that semantic node recommendation with the active node method achieved higher levels of novelty than nonsemantic node recommendation, and semantic-batch recommendation achieved higher levels of coverage and precision than non-semantic batch recommendation

Evolutionary intelligent agents for e-commerce: Generic preference detection with feature analysis

Product recommendation and preference tracking systems have been adopted extensively in e-commerce businesses. However, the heterogeneity of product attributes results in undesired impediment for an efficient yet personalized e-commerce product brokering. Amid the assortment of product attributes, there are some intrinsic generic attributes having significant relation to a customer’s generic preference. This paper proposes a novel approach in the detection of generic product attributes through feature analysis. The objective is to provide an insight to the understanding of customers’ generic preference. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm is used to find the suitable feature weight set, hence reducing the rate of misclassification. A prototype has been implemented and the experimental results are promising

A Distributed, Architecture-Centric Approach to Computing Accurate Recommendations from Very Large and Sparse Datasets

The use of recommender systems is an emerging trend today, when user behavior information is abundant. There are many large datasets available for analysis because many businesses are interested in future user opinions. Sophisticated algorithms that predict such opinions can simplify decision-making, improve customer satisfaction, and increase sales. However, modern datasets contain millions of records, which represent only a small fraction of all possible data. Furthermore, much of the information in such sparse datasets may be considered irrelevant for making individual recommendations. As a result, there is a demand for a way to make personalized suggestions from large amounts of noisy data. Current recommender systems are usually all-in-one applications that provide one type of recommendation. Their inflexible architectures prevent detailed examination of recommendation accuracy and its causes. We introduce a novel architecture model that supports scalable, distributed suggestions from multiple independent nodes. Our model consists of two components, the input matrix generation algorithm and multiple platform-independent combination algorithms. A dedicated input generation component provides the necessary data for combination algorithms, reduces their size, and eliminates redundant data processing. Likewise, simple combination algorithms can produce recommendations from the same input, so we can more easily distinguish between the benefits of a particular combination algorithm and the quality of the data it receives. Such flexible architecture is more conducive for a comprehensive examination of our system. We believe that a user's future opinion may be inferred from a small amount of data, provided that this data is most relevant. We propose a novel algorithm that generates a more optimal recommender input. Unlike existing approaches, our method sorts the relevant data twice. Doing this is slower, but the quality of the resulting input is considerably better. Furthermore, the modular nature of our approach may improve its performance, especially in the cloud computing context. We implement and validate our proposed model via mathematical modeling, by appealing to statistical theories, and through extensive experiments, data analysis, and empirical studies. Our empirical study examines the effectiveness of accuracy improvement techniques for collaborative filtering recommender systems. We evaluate our proposed architecture model on the Netflix dataset, a popular (over 130,000 solutions), large (over 100,000,000 records), and extremely sparse (1.1\%) collection of movie ratings. The results show that combination algorithm tuning has little effect on recommendation accuracy. However, all algorithms produce better results when supplied with a more relevant input. Our input generation algorithm is the reason for a considerable accuracy improvement

Fast Matrix Factorization for Online Recommendation with Implicit Feedback

This paper contributes improvements on both the effectiveness and efficiency of Matrix Factorization (MF) methods for implicit feedback. We highlight two critical issues of existing works. First, due to the large space of unobserved feedback, most existing works resort to assign a uniform weight to the missing data to reduce computational complexity. However, such a uniform assumption is invalid in real-world settings. Second, most methods are also designed in an offline setting and fail to keep up with the dynamic nature of online data. We address the above two issues in learning MF models from implicit feedback. We first propose to weight the missing data based on item popularity, which is more effective and flexible than the uniform-weight assumption. However, such a non-uniform weighting poses efficiency challenge in learning the model. To address this, we specifically design a new learning algorithm based on the element-wise Alternating Least Squares (eALS) technique, for efficiently optimizing a MF model with variably-weighted missing data. We exploit this efficiency to then seamlessly devise an incremental update strategy that instantly refreshes a MF model given new feedback. Through comprehensive experiments on two public datasets in both offline and online protocols, we show that our eALS method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art implicit MF methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/hexiangnan/sigir16-eals.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure