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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]

Item-to-item collaborative filtering (aka.item-based CF) has been long used for building recommender systems in industrial settings, owing to its interpretability and efficiency in real-time personalization. It builds a user's profile as her historically interacted items, recommending new items that are similar to the user's profile. As such, the key to an item-based CF method is in the estimation of item similarities. Early approaches use statistical measures such as cosine similarity and Pearson coefficient to estimate item similarities, which are less accurate since they lack tailored optimization for the recommendation task. In recent years, several works attempt to learn item similarities from data, by expressing the similarity as an underlying model and estimating model parameters by optimizing a recommendation-aware objective function. While extensive efforts have been made to use shallow linear models for learning item similarities, there has been relatively less work exploring nonlinear neural network models for item-based CF. In this work, we propose a neural network model namedNeural Attentive Item Similarity model(NAIS) for item-based CF. The key to our design of NAIS is an attention network, which is capable of distinguishing which historical items in a user profile are more important for a prediction. Compared to the state-of-the-art item-based CF methodFactored Item Similarity Model(FISM) , our NAIS has stronger representation power with only a few additional parameters brought by the attention network. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of NAIS. This work is the first attempt that designs neural network models for item-based CF, opening up new research possibilities for future developments of neural recommender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

A social recommendation system has attracted a lot of attention recently in the research communities of information retrieval, machine learning, and data mining. Traditional social recommendation algorithms are often based on batch machine learning methods which suffer from several critical limitations, e.g., extremely expensive model retraining cost whenever new user ratings arrive, unable to capture the change of user preferences over time. Therefore, it is important to make social recommendation system suitable for real-world online applications where data often arrives sequentially and user preferences may change dynamically and rapidly. In this paper, we present a new framework of online social recommendation from the viewpoint of online graph regularized user preference learning (OGRPL), which incorporates both collaborative user-item relationship as well as item content features into an unified preference learning process. We further develop an efficient iterative procedure, OGRPL-FW which utilizes the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, to solve the proposed online optimization problem. We conduct extensive experiments on several large-scale datasets, in which the encouraging results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms obtain significantly lower errors (in terms of both RMSE and MAE) than the state-of-the-art online recommendation methods when receiving the same amount of training data in the online learning process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]