BoostFM: Boosted Factorization Machines for Top-N Feature-based Recommendation

Feature-based matrix factorization techniques such as Factorization Machines (FM) have been proven to achieve impressive accuracy for the rating prediction task. However, most common recommendation scenarios are formulated as a top-N item ranking problem with implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, purchases)rather than explicit ratings. To address this problem, with both implicit feedback and feature information, we propose a feature-based collaborative boosting recommender called BoostFM, which integrates boosting into factorization models during the process of item ranking. Specifically, BoostFM is an adaptive boosting framework that linearly combines multiple homogeneous component recommenders, which are repeatedly constructed on the basis of the individual FM model by a re-weighting scheme. Two ways are proposed to efficiently train the component recommenders from the perspectives of both pairwise and listwise Learning-to-Rank (L2R). The properties of our proposed method are empirically studied on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that BoostFM outperforms a number of state-of-the-art approaches for top-N recommendation

LambdaFM: Learning Optimal Ranking with Factorization Machines Using Lambda Surrogates

State-of-the-art item recommendation algorithms, which apply Factorization Machines (FM) as a scoring function and pairwise ranking loss as a trainer (PRFM for short), have been recently investigated for the implicit feedback based context-aware recommendation problem (IFCAR). However, good recommenders particularly emphasize on the accuracy near the top of the ranked list, and typical pairwise loss functions might not match well with such a requirement. In this paper, we demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, PRFM models usually lead to non-optimal item recommendation results due to such a mismatch. Inspired by the success of LambdaRank, we introduce Lambda Factorization Machines (LambdaFM), which is particularly intended for optimizing ranking performance for IFCAR. We also point out that the original lambda function suffers from the issue of expensive computational complexity in such settings due to a large amount of unobserved feedback. Hence, instead of directly adopting the original lambda strategy, we create three effective lambda surrogates by conducting a theoretical analysis for lambda from the top-N optimization perspective. Further, we prove that the proposed lambda surrogates are generic and applicable to a large set of pairwise ranking loss functions. Experimental results demonstrate LambdaFM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on three real-world datasets in terms of four standard ranking measures

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

AdaTask: A Task-aware Adaptive Learning Rate Approach to Multi-task Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) models have demonstrated impressive results in computer vision, natural language processing, and recommender systems. Even though many approaches have been proposed, how well these approaches balance different tasks on each parameter still remains unclear. In this paper, we propose to measure the task dominance degree of a parameter by the total updates of each task on this parameter. Specifically, we compute the total updates by the exponentially decaying Average of the squared Updates (AU) on a parameter from the corresponding task.Based on this novel metric, we observe that many parameters in existing MTL methods, especially those in the higher shared layers, are still dominated by one or several tasks. The dominance of AU is mainly due to the dominance of accumulative gradients from one or several tasks. Motivated by this, we propose a Task-wise Adaptive learning rate approach, AdaTask in short, to separate the \emph{accumulative gradients} and hence the learning rate of each task for each parameter in adaptive learning rate approaches (e.g., AdaGrad, RMSProp, and Adam). Comprehensive experiments on computer vision and recommender system MTL datasets demonstrate that AdaTask significantly improves the performance of dominated tasks, resulting SOTA average task-wise performance. Analysis on both synthetic and real-world datasets shows AdaTask balance parameters in every shared layer well.Comment: AAAI 202

A Multi-Armed Bandit Model Selection for Cold-Start User Recommendation

International audienceHow can we effectively recommend items to a user about whom we have no information? This is the problem we focus on, known as the cold-start problem. In this paper, we focus on the cold user problem.In most existing works, the cold-start problem is handled through the use of many kinds of information available about the user. However, what happens if we do not have any information?Recommender systems usually keep a substantial amount of prediction models that are available for analysis. Moreover, recommendations to new users yield uncertain returns. Assuming a number of alternative prediction models is available to select items to recommend to a cold user, this paper introduces a multi-armed bandit based model selection, named PdMS.In comparison with two baselines, PdMS improves the performance as measured by the nDCG.These improvements are demonstrated on real, public datasets

Associations of Educational Attainment, Occupation, Social Class and Major Depressive Disorder among Han Chinese Women

Background The prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) is higher in those with low levels of educational attainment, the unemployed and those with low social status. However the extent to which these factors cause MDD is unclear. Most of the available data comes from studies in developed countries, and these findings may not extrapolate to developing countries. Examining the relationship between MDD and socio economic status in China is likely to add to the debate because of the radical economic and social changes occurring in China over the last 30 years. Principal findings We report results from 3,639 Chinese women with recurrent MDD and 3,800 controls. Highly significant odds ratios (ORs) were observed between MDD and full time employment (OR = 0.36, 95% CI = 0.25–0.46, logP = 78), social status (OR = 0.83, 95% CI = 0.77–0.87, logP = 13.3) and education attainment (OR = 0.90, 95% CI = 0.86–0.90, logP = 6.8). We found a monotonic relationship between increasing age and increasing levels of educational attainment. Those with only primary school education have significantly more episodes of MDD (mean 6.5, P-value = 0.009) and have a clinically more severe disorder, while those with higher educational attainment are likely to manifest more comorbid anxiety disorders. Conclusions In China lower socioeconomic position is associated with increased rates of MDD, as it is elsewhere in the world. Significantly more episodes of MDD occur among those with lower educational attainment (rather than longer episodes of disease), consistent with the hypothesis that the lower socioeconomic position increases the likelihood of developing MDD. The phenomenology of MDD varies according to the degree of educational attainment: higher educational attainment not only appears to protect against MDD but alters its presentation, to a more anxious phenotype

Optimizing Factorization Machines for Top-N Context-aware Recommendations

Context-aware Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques such as Factorization Machines (FM) have been proven to yield high precision for rating prediction. However, the goal of recommender systems is often referred to as a top-N item recommendation task, and item ranking is a better formulation for the recommendation problem. In this paper, we present two collaborative rankers, namely, Ranking Factorization Machines (RankingFM) and Lambda Factorization Machines (LambdaFM), which optimize the FM model for the item recommendation task. Specifically, instead of fitting the preference of individual items, we first propose a RankingFM algorithm that applies the cross-entropy loss function to the FM model to estimate the pairwise preference between individual item pairs. Second, by considering the ranking bias in item recommendations, we design two effective lambda-motivated sampling schemes to optimize desired ranking metrics. The models we propose can work with any types of context, and are capable of estimating latent interactions between the context features under sparsity. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over several state-of-the-art methods on three real-world CF datasets in terms of two standard ranking metric

Mathematical modeling of thermal processes: Effects on food safety and starch

Unavoidable process temperature deviations in retort operations can compromise product safety and quality as well as production efficiency if improperly handled. Two methods, the Fixed Point (FP) and the Worst Case (WC) methods, aimed to automatically correct the adverse effect of those process temperature deviations during thermal processes in the operations of continuous retorts were developed. These methods have the potential to quickly analyze and accurately estimate the effect of process deviations on the thermal lethality of canned foods processed in continuous retorts. The FP algorithm consists of the selection of a point that for convenience is located close to the retort steam chamber exit, whereas the WC algorithm consists of searching for the worst case container, defined as the one requiring the lowest conveyor speed. Simulations showed that the computation time for estimating conveyor speed adjustments using both algorithms was less than 1 second in a personal desktop Pentium IV computer. Accurate heat transfer calculations are the basis for developing suitable control algorithms. The Apparent Position Numerical Solution (APNS) method, which was used in the control algorithms developed in this study, did not provide a good temperature prediction in the initial stage of the process cooling phase. A mathematical method was developed to fix this problem. Heat transfer calculations using numerical methods rely on accurate heat penetration parameters. For thermal processes of starch based food systems, which exhibit a broken-line heating behavior, the heating parameters are strongly associated to the viscosity changes during the heating stage. Major factors affecting the viscosity of swollen crosslinked corn starch (CCS) suspensions were identified and a mathematical model to estimate changes of viscosity was developed in this study. A method to predict the momentary granule sizes, which are closely related to viscosity of a starch suspension, under non-isothermal conditions was also developed. Accurate evaluation of thermal lethality is essential for thermal process design and control. The Weibull model provides a better estimation of process lethality than conventional first-order kinetics. A numerical method suitable for on-line estimation of thermal lethality under non-isothermal conditions was also developed in this study

Correction: Immorally obtained principal increases investors' risk preference.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175181.]

Adaptive Neural Network Control of Zero-Speed Vessel Fin Stabilizer Based on Command Filter

This paper proposes a zero-speed vessel fin stabilizer adaptive neural network control strategy based on a command filter for the problem of large-angle rolling motion caused by adverse sea conditions when a vessel is at low speed down to zero. In order to avoid the adverse effects of the high-frequency part of the marine environment on the vessel rolling control system, a command filter is introduced in the design of the controller and a command filter backstepping control method is designed. An auxiliary dynamic system (ADS) is constructed to correct the feedback error caused by input saturation. Considering that the system has unknown internal parameters and unmodeled dynamics, and is affected by unknown disturbances from the outside, the neural network technology and nonlinear disturbance observer are fused in the proposed design, which not only combines the advantages of the two but also overcomes the limitations of the single technique itself. Through Lyapunov theoretical analysis, the stability of the control system is proved. Finally, the simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the control method