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Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, whose goal is to predict the probability of the user to click on an item, has become increasingly significant in the recommender systems. Recently, some deep learning models with the ability to automatically extract the user interest from his/her behaviors have achieved great success. In these work, the attention mechanism is used to select the user interested items in historical behaviors, improving the performance of the CTR predictor. Normally, these attentive modules can be jointly trained with the base predictor by using gradient descents. In this paper, we regard user interest modeling as a feature selection problem, which we call user interest selection. For such a problem, we propose a novel approach under the framework of the wrapper method, which is named Meta-Wrapper. More specifically, we use a differentiable module as our wrapping operator and then recast its learning problem as a continuous bilevel optimization. Moreover, we use a meta-learning algorithm to solve the optimization and theoretically prove its convergence. Meanwhile, we also provide theoretical analysis to show that our proposed method 1) efficiencies the wrapper-based feature selection, and 2) achieves better resistance to overfitting. Finally, extensive experiments on three public datasets manifest the superiority of our method in boosting the performance of CTR prediction. [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]

The wide deployment of advanced robots with industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies in smart factories generates a large volume of data during production and a wide variety of data processing workloads are launched to maintain productivity and safety of smart manufacture. The emerging fog computing paradigm offers a promising solution to enhancing data processing performance in a smart factory environment while on the other hand brings in new challenges to resource management, which call for a more effective approach for recommending resource configurations to heterogeneous workloads. In this paper, we propose an Optimized Recommendations of Heterogeneous Resource Configurations (ORHRC) model that employs machine learning techniques to provide resource configuration recommendations for the heterogeneous workloads in a fog computing-based smart factory environment. ORHRC learns a recommendation model by leveraging the operating characteristics and execution time of workloads on fog servers with different configurations. We also design a decision model in ORHRC to further improve prediction accuracy and reduce operational overheads. Experiment results show that ORHRC outperforms the state of art configuration recommendation methods in terms of average prediction accuracy. Note to Practitioners—The various data processing workloads in a smart factory environment need to be processed by the computational resources with optimal configurations for meeting their performance requirements. In this paper, we employ machine learning technologies for enabling automatic recommendation of resource configurations to heterogeneous workloads. Specifically, we develop an Optimized Recommendations of Heterogeneous Resource Configurations (ORHRC) model that can identify the optimal resource configurations for various workloads. We also conducted extensive experiments that verify the effectiveness of the proposed ORHRC model. [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]

Tremendous success of machine learning (ML) and the unabated growth in model complexity motivated many ML-specific designs in hardware architectures to speed up the model inference. While these architectures are diverse, highly optimized low-precision arithmetic is a component shared by most. Nevertheless, recommender systems important to Facebook's personalization services are demanding and complex: They must serve billions of users per month responsively with low latency while maintaining high prediction accuracy. Do these low-precision architectures work well with our production recommendation systems? They do. But not without significant effort. In this article, we share our search strategies to adapt reference recommendation models to low-precision hardware, our optimization of low-precision compute kernels, and the tool chain to maintain our models' accuracy throughout their lifespan. We believe our lessons from the trenches can promote better codesign between hardware architecture and software engineering, and advance the state of the art of ML in industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of collaborative recommender systems (CRSs) rely on statistical and data analysis methods for comparing users. However, dealing with them using machine learning techniques seems to be more appropriate. This paper investigates the usage of feature selection and classification methods for CRSs. It suggests building a user model suitable for the classification purpose and proposes a density-based feature selection (DBFS) method based on the rating density for each class. The DBFS reduces the effect of sparsity problem and keeps only users having a dense-feature history. Additionally, a cascaded feature selection method is proposed to pick out a subset of features through a two-layer approach. The first layer applies a classical feature selection method while the second layer applied the DBFS on the output of the first layer. The results show that the performance is gradually improved. The cascaded feature selection yields the best results since it improves the system accuracy, reduces the space and processing complexities, and alleviates the sparsity in two cascaded layers. The achieved improvements by cascaded feature selection as compared to SVM are 6.55 percent, 10.14 percent, and 3.92 percent in terms of accuracy, F-measure and MAE, respectively.

Non-negative latent factor (NLF) models can efficiently acquire useful knowledge from high-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrices filled with non-negative data. Single latent factor-dependent, non-negative and multiplicative update (SLF-NMU) is an efficient algorithm for building an NLF model on an HiDS matrix, yet it suffers slow convergence. A momentum method is frequently adopted to accelerate a learning algorithm, but it is incompatible with those implicitly adopting gradients like SLF-NMU. To build a fast NLF (FNLF) model, we propose a generalized momentum method compatible with SLF-NMU. With it, we further propose a single latent factor-dependent non-negative, multiplicative and momentum-incorporated update algorithm, thereby achieving an FNLF model. Empirical studies on six HiDS matrices from industrial application indicate that an FNLF model outperforms an NLF model in terms of both convergence rate and prediction accuracy for missing data. Hence, compared with an NLF model, an FNLF model is more practical in industrial applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The correlation filters based trackers have achieved an excellent performance for object tracking in recent years. However, most existing methods use only one filter but ignore the information of the previous filters. In this paper, we propose a novel online multi-expert learning algorithm for visual tracking. In our proposed scheme, there are former trackers which retain the previous filters, and those trackers will give their predictions in each frame. The current tracker represents the filter of current frame, and both the current tracker and the former trackers constitute our expert ensemble. We use an adaptive Second-order Quantile strategy to learn the weights of each expert, which can take full advantage of all the experts. To simplify our model and remove some bad experts, we prune our models via a minimum entropy criterion. Finally, we propose a new update strategy to avoid the model corruption problem. Extensive experimental results on both OTB2013 and OTB2015 benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed tracker performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. [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]

The five articles in this special section focus on data mining technqiues and applications in the music industry. Music has been an important application area for data mining and machine learning techniques for many years. Music data mining is an interdisciplinary area that studies computational methods for understanding and delivering music data and is a topic of growing importance with large commercial relevance and substantial potential. The research area of music datamining has gradually evolved during this time period in order to address the challenge of effectively accessing and interacting with these increasing large collections of music and associated data such as styles, artists, lyrics and music reviews. The algorithms and systems developed frequently employ sophisticated and advanced data mining and machine learning techniques in their attempt to better capture the frequently elusive relevant music information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Paradoxically, a growing number of available channels in digital cable TV systems brings discomfort to the viewers who now experience difficulties in finding a content that would hold their attention. In such an environment, personalized program guides are needed to assist the viewers in retrieving the preferred programs in reasonable time. The design of these systems is bounded by the demand of unobtrusiveness and the limitations of broadcast infrastructure, with the lack of return (uplink) connection to the network center being the most significant one. In this paper, we investigate learning of user?s viewing preferences through mechanism known as relevance feedback. Our goal is to develop a system that would efficiently track the patterns of user?s interests without disturbing her viewing habits. Our proposal applies the elements of machine learning and information retrieval theory. We consider three different schemes and validate their performances by series of computer simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]