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With the boosting of neural networks, recommendation methods become significantly improved by their powerful ability of prediction and inference. Existing neural-network based recommender systems (NN-RSs) usually first employ matrix embedding (ME) as a pre-process to learn users’ and items’ representations (latent vectors), then input these representations to a specific modified neural network framework to make accurate Top-k recommendations. Obviously, the performance of ME has a significant effect on RS models. However, most NN-RSs focus on accuracy by building representations from the direct user-item interactions (e.g., user-item rating matrix), while ignoring the underlying relatedness between users and items (e.g., users who rate the same ratings for the same items should be embedded into similar representations), which is an ideological disadvantage. On the other hand, ME models directly employ inner products as a default loss function metric that cannot project users and items into a proper latent space, which is a methodological disadvantage. In this paper, we propose a supervised collaborative representation learning model - Magnetic Metric Learning (MML) - to map users and items into a unified latent vector space, enhancing the representation learning for NN-RSs. First, MML utilizes dual triplets to model not only the observed relationships between users and items, but also the underlying relationships between users as well as items to overcome the ideological disadvantage. Specifically, a modified metric-based dual loss function is proposed in MML to gather similar entities and disperse the dissimilar ones. With MML, we can easily compare all the relationships (user to user, item to item, user to item) according to the weighted metric, which overcomes the methodological disadvantage. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets with large item space. The results demonstrate that MML can learn a proper unified latent space for representations from the user-item matrix with high accuracy and effectiveness, and lead to a performance gain over the state-of-the-art RS models by an average of 17 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human behaviors in recommendation systems are driven by many high-level, complex, and evolving intentions behind their decision making processes. In order to achieve better performance, it is important for recommendation systems to be aware of user intentions besides considering the historical interaction behaviors. However, user intentions are seldom fully or easily observed in practice, so that the existing works are incapable of fully tracking and modeling user intentions, not to mention using them effectively into recommendation. In this paper, we present the Intention-Aware Sequential Recommendation (ISRec) method, for capturing the underlying intentions of each user that may lead to her next consumption behavior and improving recommendation performance. Specifically, we first extract the intentions of the target user from sequential contexts, then take complex intent transition into account through the message-passing mechanism on an intention graph, and finally obtain the future intentions of this target user from inference on the intention graph. The sequential recommendation for a user will be made based on the predicted user intentions, offering more transparent and explainable intermediate results for each recommendation. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method against several state-of-the-art baselines in sequential recommendation in terms of different metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-criteria recommender systems have been increasingly useful for helping consumers identify the most relevant items based on different dimensions of user experiences and highlighting their most valued features. Therefore, researchers have proposed various multi-criteria models to improve recommendation performance. However, most of the existing methods utilize only multi-criteria ratings explicitly provided by the users. Note that explicit multi-criteria ratings are sparse and have the problem of missing values. User reviews, on the other hand, contain richer information of user experiences and reveal multi-dimensional user preferences. Therefore, we propose to use latent multi-criteria ratings generated from user reviews, as opposed to explicit multi-criteria ratings, to provide recommendations and capture latent complex heterogeneous user preferences. Specifically, we propose two novel models for the latent multi-criteria rating generation process: the one-stage model LatentMC-1S that utilizes document hashing method to directly compute latent ratings and the two-stage model LatentMC-2S that uses GRU and Gumbel-Softmax for indirect rating generation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed latent multi-criteria rating approaches outperform explicit ratings across different datasets and performance measures. We also show that latent multi-criteria ratings could be used for imputing missing explicit multi-criteria ratings and thus further improving multi-criteria recommender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, some attempts have been made in introducing deep neural networks (DNNs) to recommender systems for generating more accurate prediction due to the nonlinear representation learning capability of DNNs. However, they inevitably result in high computational and storage costs. Worse still, due to the relatively small number of ratings that can be fed into DNNs, they may easily suffer from the overfitting issue. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel recommendation framework based on Back Propagation (BP) neural network with attention mechanism, namely BPAM++. In particular, the BP neural network is utilized to learn the complex relationship between the target user and his/her neighbors and the complex relationship between the target item and its neighbors. Compared with DNNs, the shallow neural network, i.e., BP neural network, can not only reduce the computational and storage costs, but also alleviate the overfitting issues in DNNs caused by a relatively small number of ratings. In addition, an attention mechanism is designed to capture the global impact of the nearest users of the target user on their nearest target user sets. Extensive experiments conducted on eight benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature combinations are essential for the success of many web applications, such as personalised recommendation and online advertising. State-of-the-art methods usually model explicit feature interactions to help neural networks reduce the number of parameters and achieve better performance. However, their explicit feature interactions are often restricted to the second-order due to computational complexity. In this work, we propose efficient ways to represent explicit high-order feature combinations as well as prune redundant features in the mean time. To begin with, we make novel use of the Count Sketch algorithm within a DNN classifier such that high-order feature combinations can be compactly represented. After that, to combat the problem of redundant features which degrade the prediction performance, we introduce an adaptive hashing algorithm, AutoHash, which can automatically select meaningful features to interact at high orders according to the specific dataset in question. This is an AutoML approach. Experiments on three well-known public datasets demonstrate that AutoHash is significantly superior to state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, due to its efficient scheme of automatically selecting useful high-order feature interactions, AutoHash has less model complexity and can be trained in an end-to-end manner with less training time than state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning can provide deep insights into data, allowing machines to make high-quality predictions and having been widely used in real-world applications, such as text mining, visual classification, and recommender systems. However, most sophisticated machine learning approaches suffer from huge time costs when operating on large-scale data. This issue calls for the need of Large-scale Machine Learning (LML), which aims to learn patterns from big data with comparable performance efficiently. In this paper, we offer a systematic survey on existing LML methods to provide a blueprint for the future developments of this area. We first divide these LML methods according to the ways of improving the scalability: 1) model simplification on computational complexities, 2) optimization approximation on computational efficiency, and 3) computation parallelism on computational capabilities. Then we categorize the methods in each perspective according to their targeted scenarios and introduce representative methods in line with intrinsic strategies. Lastly, we analyze their limitations and discuss potential directions as well as open issues that are promising to address in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is crucial to model missing ratings in recommender systems since user preferences learnt from only observed ratings are biased. One possible explanation for missing ratings is motivated by the spiral of silence theory. When the majority opinion is formed, a spiral process is triggered where users are more and more likely to show their ratings if they perceive that they are supported by the opinion climate. In this paper we first verify the existence of the spiral process in recommender systems by using a variety of different real-life datasets. We then study the characteristics of two key factors in the spiral process: opinion climate and the hardcore users who will give ratings even when they are minority opinion holders. Based on our empirical findings, we develop four variants to model missing ratings. They mimic different components of the spiral of silence based on the spiral process with global opinion climate, local opinion climate, hardcore users, relationships between hardcore users and items, respectively. We experimentally show that, the presented variants all outperform state-of-the-art recommendation models with missing rating components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, model-based approaches have shown their effectiveness in computing recommendation lists in different domains and settings. By relying on the computation of latent factors, they can recommend items with a very high level of accuracy. Unfortunately, when moving to the latent space, even if the model embeds content-based information, we miss references to the actual semantics of the recommended item. It makes the interpretation of the recommendation process non-trivial. In this paper, we show how to initialize latent factors in Factorization Machines by using semantic features coming from knowledge graphs to train an interpretable model, which is, in turn, able to provide recommendations with a high level of accuracy. In the presented approach, semantic features are injected into the learning process to retain the original informativeness of the items available in the dataset. By relying on the information encoded in the original knowledge graph, we also propose two metrics to evaluate the semantic accuracy and robustness of knowledge-aware interpretability. An extensive experimental evaluation on six different datasets shows the effectiveness of the interpretable model in terms of both accuracy and diversity of recommendation results and interpretability robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event-based online social platforms, such as Meetup and Plancast, have experienced increased popularity and rapid growth in recent years. In EBSN setup, selecting suitable venues for hosting events, which can attract a great turnout, is a key challenge. In this paper, we present a deep learning based venue recommendation system $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e which provides context driven venue recommendations for the Meetup event-hosts to host their events. The crux of the proposed model relies on the notion of similarity between multiple Meetup entities such as events, venues, groups, etc. We develop deep learning techniques to compute a compact descriptor for each entity, such that two entities (say, venues) can be compared numerically. Notably, to mitigate the scarcity of venue related information in Meetup, we leverage on the cross domain knowledge transfer from popular LBSN service Yelp to extract rich venue related content. For hosting an event, the proposed $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e model computes a success score for each candidate venue and ranks those venues according to the scores and finally recommend the top k venues. Our rigorous evaluation on the Meetup data collected for the city of Chicago shows that $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e significantly outperforms the baselines algorithms. Precisely, for 84 percent of events, the correct hosting venue appears in the top 5 of the $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e recommended list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In e-learning recommender systems, interpersonal information between learners is very scarce, which makes it difficult to apply collaborative filtering (CF) techniques to achieve recommendations. In this study, we propose a hybrid filtering recommendation approach ($SI-IFL$ S I - I F L ) combining learner influence model (LIM), self-organization based (SOB) recommendation strategy, and sequential pattern mining (SPM) together for recommending learning objects (LOs) to learners. The method works as follows: (i) LIM is applied to acquire the interpersonal information by computing the influence that a learner exerts on others. LIM consists of learner similarity, knowledge credibility, and learner aggregation, meanwhile, LIM is independent of ratings. Furthermore, to address the uncertainty and fuzzy natures of learners, intuitionistic fuzzy logic (IFL) is applied to optimize the LIM. (ii) A SOB recommendation strategy is applied to recommend the optimal learner cliques for active learners by simulating the influence propagation among learners. Influence propagation means that a learner can move towards active learners, and such behaviors can stimulate the moving behaviors of his/her neighbors. This SOB recommendation approach achieves a stable structure based on distributed and bottom-up behaviors of individuals. (iii) SPM is applied to decide the final learning objects (LOs) and navigational paths based on the recommended learner cliques. The experimental results demonstrate that $SI-IFL$ S I - I F L can provide personalized and diversified recommendations, and it shows promising efficiency and adaptability in e-learning scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a typical latent factor model, Matrix Factorization (MF) has demonstrated its great effectiveness in recommender systems. Users and items are represented in a shared low-dimensional space so that the user preference can be modeled by linearly combining the item factor vector $V$ using the user-specific coefficients $U$ . From a generative model perspective, $U$ and $V$ are drawn from two independent Gaussian distributions, which is not so faithful to the reality. Items are produced to maximally meet users’ requirements, which makes $U$ and $V$ strongly correlated. Meanwhile, the linear combination between $U$ and $V$ forces a bijection (one-to-one mapping), which thereby neglects the mutual correlation between the latent factors. In this paper, we address the upper drawbacks, and propose a new model, named Correlated Matrix Factorization (CMF). Technically, we apply Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to map $U$ and $V$ into a new semantic space. Besides achieving the optimal fitting on the rating matrix, one component in each vector ($U$ or $V$ ) is also tightly correlated with every single component in the other. We derive efficient inference and learning algorithms based on variational EM methods. The effectiveness of our proposed model is comprehensively verified on four public datasets. Experimental results show that our approach achieves competitive performance on both prediction accuracy and efficiency compared with the current state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social recommender system, using social relation networks as additional input to improve the accuracy of traditional recommender systems, has become an important research topic. However, most existing methods utilize the entire user relationship network with no consideration to its huge size, sparsity, imbalance, and noise issues. This may degrade the efficiency and accuracy of social recommender systems. This study proposes a new approach to manage the complexity of adding social relation networks to recommender systems. Our method first generates an individual relationship network (IRN) for each user and item by developing a novel fitting algorithm of relationship networks to control the relationship propagation and contracting. We then fuse matrix factorization with social regularization and the neighborhood model using IRN's to generate recommendations. Our approach is quite general, and can also be applied to the item-item relationship network by switching the roles of users and items. Experiments on four datasets with different sizes, sparsity levels, and relationship types show that our approach can improve predictive accuracy and gain a better scalability compared with state-of-the-art social recommendation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Personalized review-based rating prediction, a newly emerged research problem, aims at inferring users’ ratings over their unrated items using existing reviews and corresponding ratings. While some researchers proposed to learn topic factor from review text to obtain interpretability for rating prediction, they often overlooked the fact that the learned topic factors are limited to review text and cannot fully reveal the complicated relations between reviews and ratings. Moreover, topic modeling based solutions for this problem usually utilize Gibbs sampling algorithms to learn topics and word distributions, resulting in non-negligible computational overload. To address the above challenges, we propose an integrated topic and latent factor model (ITLFM), which combines topic and latent factors in a linear way to make them complement each other for better accuracies in rating prediction tasks. In addition, ITLFM models review text through an additive topic model to reveal user's and item's topic factors simultaneously. To ensure high learning efficiency, we design a hybrid stochastic learning algorithm for ITLFM. We evaluate ITLFM on several standard benchmarks and compare with representative approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ITLFM method is computationally efficient and accurate, as well as scalable for large scale applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose TrustSVD, a trust-based matrix factorization technique for recommendations. TrustSVD integrates multiple information sources into the recommendation model in order to reduce the data sparsity and cold start problems and their degradation of recommendation performance. An analysis of social trust data from four real-world data sets suggests that not only the explicit but also the implicit influence of both ratings and trust should be taken into consideration in a recommendation model. TrustSVD therefore builds on top of a state-of-the-art recommendation algorithm, SVD++ (which uses the explicit and implicit influence of rated items), by further incorporating both the explicit and implicit influence of trusted and trusting users on the prediction of items for an active user. The proposed technique is the first to extend SVD++ with social trust information. Experimental results on the four data sets demonstrate that TrustSVD achieves better accuracy than other ten counterparts recommendation techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recommender systems are promising for providing personalized favorite services. Collaborative filtering (CF) technologies, making prediction of users’ preference based on users’ previous behaviors, have become one of the most successful techniques to build modern recommender systems. Several challenging issues occur in previously proposed CF methods: 1) most CF methods ignore users’ response patterns and may yield biased parameter estimation and suboptimal performance; 2) some CF methods adopt heuristic weight settings, which lacks a systematical implementation; and 3) the multinomial mixture models may weaken the computational ability of matrix factorization for generating the data matrix, thus increasing the computational cost of training. To resolve these issues, we incorporate users’ response models into the probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF), a popular matrix factorization CF model, to establish the response aware probabilistic matrix factorization (RAPMF) framework. More specifically, we make the assumption on the user response as a Bernoulli distribution which is parameterized by the rating scores for the observed ratings while as a step function for the unobserved ratings. Moreover, we speed up the algorithm by a mini-batch implementation and a crafting scheduling policy. Finally, we design different experimental protocols and conduct systematical empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the merits of the proposed RAPMF and its mini-batch implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the measure of recommendation stability, which reflects the consistency of recommender system predictions. Stability is a desired property of recommendation algorithms and has important implications on users’ trust and acceptance of recommendations. Prior research has reported that some popular recommendation algorithms can suffer from a high degree of instability. In this study, we explore two scalable, general-purpose meta-algorithmic approaches—based on bagging and iterative smoothing—that can be used in conjunction with different traditional recommendation algorithms to improve their stability. Our experimental results on real-world rating data demonstrate that both approaches can achieve substantially higher stability as compared to the original recommendation algorithms. Furthermore, perhaps as importantly, the proposed approaches not only do not sacrifice the predictive accuracy in order to improve recommendation stability, but are actually able to provide additional accuracy improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]