Improving neighborhood based Collaborative Filtering via integrated folksonomy information

Personalized recommender systems which can provide people with suggestions according to individual interests usually rely on Collaborative Filtering (CF). The neighborhood based model (NBM) is a common choice when implementing such recommenders due to the intuitive nature; however, the recommendation accuracy is a major concern. Current NBM based recommenders mostly address the accuracy issue based on the rating data alone, whereas research on hybrid recommender systems suggests that users enjoy specifying feedback about items across multiple dimensions. In this work we aim to improve the accuracy of NBM via integrating the folksonomy information. To achieve this objective, we first propose the folksonomy network (FN) to analyze the item relevance described by the folksonomy data. We subsequently integrate the obtained folksonomy information into the global-optimization based NBM for making multi-source based recommendations. Experiments on the MovieLens dataset suggest positive results, which prove the efficiency of our strategy.     

Representation of human preference using folksonomy and the idea called concept

This paper presents an application of the idea called concept for realizing more appropriate representation of human preferences. In the previous study, we proposed the new information recommendation method. Concretely, items for recommendation were selected using the idea of concept, which are impressions of users on items inferred using tagging data of a folksonomy. In the method, characteristics of items were represented by concepts, and it is expected that preferences of users can be represented by concepts as well. However, accuracy of concepts is influential in this approach. In this study, we investigated the validity of the obtained concepts using the previous proposed method, and proposed the improved derivation method of concepts. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified trough comparison experiments with the previous method.     

一种检测兴趣漂移的图结构推荐系统

协同过滤是构造推荐系统最有效的方法之一.其中,基于图结构推荐方法成为近来协同过滤的研究热点.基于图结构的方法视用户和项为图的结点,并利用图理论去计算用户和项之间的相似度.尽管人们对图结构推荐系统开展了很多的研究和应用,然而这些研究都认为用户的兴趣是保持不变的,所以不能够根据用户兴趣的相关变化做出合理推荐.本文提出一种新的可以检测用户兴趣漂移的图结构推荐系统.首先,设计了一个新的兴趣漂移检测方法,它可以有效地检测出用户兴趣在何时发生了哪种变化.其次,根据用户的兴趣序列,对评分项进行加权并构造用户特征向量.最后,整合二部投影与随机游走进行项推荐.在标准数据集MovieLens上的测试表明算法优于两个图结构推荐方法和一个评分时间加权的协同过滤方法.     

Folksonomy‐Based Recommender Systems: A State‐of‐the‐Art Review

Collaborative tagging systems, also known as folksonomies, have grown in popularity over the Web on account of their simplicity to organize several types of content (e.g., Web pages, pictures, and video) using open‐ended tags. The rapid adoption of these systems has led to an increasing amount of users providing information about themselves and, at the same time, a growing and rich corpus of social knowledge that can be exploited by recommendation technologies. In this context, tripartite relationships between users, resources, and tags contained in folksonomies set new challenges for knowledge discovery approaches to be applied for the purposes of assisting users through recommendation systems. This review aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of folksonomy‐based recommender systems. Current recommendation approaches stemming from fields such as user modeling, collaborative filtering, content, and link‐analysis are reviewed and discussed to provide a starting point for researchers in the field as well as explore future research lines.     

Swallow: Resource and Tag Recommender System Based on Heat Diffusion Algorithm in Social Annotation Systems

Social annotation systems (SAS) allow users to annotate different online resources with keywords (tags). These systems help users in finding, organizing, and retrieving online resources to significantly provide collaborative semantic data to be potentially applied by recommender systems. Previous studies on SAS had been worked on tag recommendation. Recently, SAS‐based resource recommendation has received more attention by scholars. In the most of such systems, with respect to annotated tags, searched resources are recommended to user, and their recent behavior and click‐through is not taken into account. In the current study, to be able to design and implement a more precise recommender system, because of previous users' tagging data and users' current click‐through, it was attempted to work on the both resource (such as web pages, research papers, etc.) and tag recommendation problem. Moreover, by applying heat diffusion algorithm during the recommendation process, more diverse options would present to the user. After extracting data, such as users, tags, resources, and relations between them, the recommender system so called “Swallow” creates a graph‐based pattern from system log files. Eventually, following the active user path and observing heat conduction on the created pattern, user further goals are anticipated and recommended to him. Test results on SAS data set demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has improved the accuracy of former recommendation algorithms.     

Noisy but non-malicious user detection in social recommender systems

Social recommender systems largely rely on user-contributed data to infer users’ preference. While this feature has enabled many interesting applications in social networking services, it also introduces unreliability to recommenders as users are allowed to insert data freely. Although detecting malicious attacks from social spammers has been studied for years, little work was done for detecting Noisy but Non-Malicious Users (NNMUs), which refers to those genuine users who may provide some untruthful data due to their imperfect behaviors. Unlike colluded malicious attacks that can be detected by finding similarly-behaved user profiles, NNMUs are more difficult to identify since their profiles are neither similar nor correlated from one another. In this article, we study how to detect NNMUs in social recommender systems. Based on the assumption that the ratings provided by a same user on closely correlated items should have similar scores, we propose an effective method for NNMU detection by capturing and accumulating user’s “self-contradictions”, i.e., the cases that a user provides very different rating scores on closely correlated items. We show that self-contradiction capturing can be formulated as a constrained quadratic optimization problem w.r.t. a set of slack variables, which can be further used to quantify the underlying noise in each test user profile. We adopt three real-world data sets to empirically test the proposed method. The experimental results show that our method (i) is effective in real-world NNMU detection scenarios, (ii) can significantly outperform other noisy-user detection methods, and (iii) can improve recommendation performance for other users after removing detected NNMUs from the recommender system.     

A Review of Ontology‐Based Tag Recommendation Approaches

Tag recommender schemes suggest related tags for an untagged resource and better tag suggestions to tagged resources. Tagging is very important if the user identifies the tag that is more precise to use in searching interesting blogs. There is no clear information regarding the meaning of each tag in a tagging process. An user can use various tags for the same content, and he can also use new tags for an item in a blog. When the user selects tags, the resultant metadata may comprise homonyms and synonyms. This may cause an improper relationship among items and ineffective searches for topic information. The collaborative tag recommendation allows a set of freely selected text keywords as tags assigned by users. These tags are imprecise, irrelevant, and misleading because there is no control over the tag assignment. It does not follow any formal guidelines to assist tag generation, and tags are assigned to resources based on the knowledge of the users. This causes misspelled tags, multiple tags with the same meaning, bad word encoding, and personalized words without common meaning. This problem leads to miscategorization of items, irrelevant search results, wrong prediction, and their recommendations. Tag relevancy can be judged only by a specific user. These aspects could provide new challenges and opportunities to its tag recommendation problem. This paper reviews the challenges to meet the tag recommendation problem. A brief comparison between existing works is presented, which we can identify and point out the novel research directions. The overall performance of our ontology‐based recommender systems is favorably compared to other systems in the literature.     

融合矩阵分解与距离度量学习的社会化推荐算法

为解决传统推荐系统中存在的冷启动难题,基于距离反映偏好的假设提出了一种融合矩阵分解与距离度量学习的社会化推荐算法。该算法同时对样本和距离度量进行训练,在满足距离约束的前提下更新距离度量和用户与项目的坐标,并将用户与项目嵌入到统一的低维空间,利用用户与项目之间的距离生成推荐结果。基于豆瓣和Epi-nions数据集的对比实验结果验证了该方法可有效提高推荐系统的可解释性和精确度,明显优于基于矩阵分解的推荐方法。研究结果表明,所提方法缓解了传统推荐系统中存在的冷启动问题,为推荐系统的研究提供了另一种可供参考的研究思路。     

An algorithm for efficient privacy-preserving item-based collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) methods are widely adopted by existing recommender systems, which can analyze and predict user “ratings” or “preferences” of newly generated items based on user historical behaviors. However, privacy issue arises in this process as sensitive user private data are collected by the recommender server. Recently proposed privacy-preserving collaborative filtering (PPCF) methods, using computation-intensive cryptography techniques or data perturbation techniques are not appropriate in real online services. In this paper, an efficient privacy-preserving item-based collaborative filtering algorithm is proposed, which can protect user privacy during online recommendation process without compromising recommendation accuracy and efficiency. The proposed method is evaluated using the Netflix Prize dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms a randomized perturbation based PPCF solution and a homomorphic encryption based PPCF solution by over 14X and 386X, respectively, in recommendation efficiency while achieving similar or even better recommendation accuracy.     

Modeling and broadening temporal user interest in personalized news recommendation

User profiling is an important step for solving the problem of personalized news recommendation. Traditional user profiling techniques often construct profiles of users based on static historical data accessed by users. However, due to the frequent updating of news repository, it is possible that a user’s fine-grained reading preference would evolve over time while his/her long-term interest remains stable. Therefore, it is imperative to reason on such preference evaluation for user profiling in news recommenders. Besides, in content-based news recommenders, a user’s preference tends to be stable due to the mechanism of selecting similar content-wise news articles with respect to the user’s profile. To activate users’ reading motivations, a successful recommender needs to introduce “somewhat novel” articles to users.In this paper, we initially provide an experimental study on the evolution of user interests in real-world news recommender systems, and then propose a novel recommendation approach, in which the long-term and short-term reading preferences of users are seamlessly integrated when recommending news items. Given a hierarchy of newly-published news articles, news groups that a user might prefer are differentiated using the long-term profile, and then in each selected news group, a list of news items are chosen as the recommended candidates based on the short-term user profile. We further propose to select news items from the user–item affinity graph using absorbing random walk model to increase the diversity of the recommended news list. Extensive empirical experiments on a collection of news data obtained from various popular news websites demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.     

基于标签信息特征相似性的协同过滤个性化推荐

标签推荐系统旨在利用标签数据为用户提供个性化推荐。已有的基于标签的推荐方法往往忽视了用户和资源本身的特征,而且在相似性度量时仅针对项目相似性或用户相似性进行计算,并未充分考虑二者之间的有效融合,推荐结果的准确性较低。为了解决上述问题,将标签信息融入到结合用户相似性和项目相似性的协同过滤中,提出融合标签特征与相似性的协同过滤个性化推荐方法。该方法在充分考虑用户、项目以及标签信息的基础上,利用二维矩阵来定义用户-标签以及标签-项目之间的行为。构建用户和项目的标签特征表示,通过基于标签特征的相似性度量方法计算用户相似性和项目相似性。基于用户标签行为和用户与项目的相似性线性组合来预测用户对项目的偏好值,并根据预测偏好值排序,生成最终的推荐列表。在Last.fm数据集上的实验结果表明,该方法能够提高推荐的准确度,满足用户的个性化需求。     

Illuminating Recommendation by Understanding the Explicit Item Relations

Recent years have witnessed the prevalence of recommender systems in various fields, which provide a personalized recommendation list for each user based on various kinds of information. For quite a long time, most researchers have been pursing recommendation performances with predefined metrics, e.g., accuracy. However, in real-world applications, users select items from a huge item list by considering their internal personalized demand and external constraints. Thus, we argue that explicitly modeling the complex relations among items under domain-specific applications is an indispensable part for enhancing the recommendations. Actually, in this area, researchers have done some work to understand the item relations gradually from “implicit” to “explicit” views when recommending. To this end, in this paper, we conduct a survey of these recent advances on recommender systems from the perspective of the explicit item relation understanding. We organize these relevant studies from three types of item relations, i.e., combination-effect relations, sequence-dependence relations, and external-constraint relations. Specifically, the combination-effect relation and the sequence-dependence relation based work models the intra-group intrinsic relations of items from the user demand perspective, and the external-constraint relation emphasizes the external requirements for items. After that, we also propose our opinions on the open issues along the line of understanding item relations and suggest some future research directions in recommendation area.     

一种解决新项目冷启动问题的推荐算法

推荐系统作为缓解信息过载问题的有效方法之一,在社交媒体中的作用日趋重要.但是,新项目冷启动和新用户冷启动问题是推荐技术面临的难题.为了解决新项目冷启动问题,提出了用户时间权重信息概念,该定义考虑到了用户评价时间与项目发布时间的时间间隔,根据用户时间权重值的大小,可以判断该用户是积极用户还是消极用户,以及用户对新项目的偏爱程度;利用三分图的形式来描述用户-项目-标签、用户-项目-属性之间的关系.在充分考虑用户、标签、项目属性、时间等信息基础上,获得个性化的预测评分值公式,提出了推荐算法.实验结果表明:所提出的方法能够实现满足不同用户、不同偏好的个性化推荐,在为用户推荐到合适项目的同时还能带来惊喜.比较实验说明,所提出的方法推荐准确度高,推荐新颖度高.交叉验证实验结果表明:该方法在解决推荐算法中的新项目冷启动问题上,无论是在推荐的准确度还是推荐项目的新颖度上都是有效的.     

A query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy

In this paper we propose a query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy, storing and classifying the tags used to label a set of available resources. Our approach builds and maintains a profile for each user. When he submits a query (consisting of a set of tags) on this folksonomy to retrieve a set of resources of his interest, it automatically finds further “authoritative” tags to enrich his query and proposes them to him. All “authoritative” tags considered interesting by the user are exploited to refine his query and, along with those tags directly specified by him, are stored in his profile in such a way to enrich it. The expansion of user queries and the enrichment of user profiles allow any content-based recommender system operating on the folksonomy to retrieve and suggest a high number of resources matching with user needs and desires. Moreover, enriched user profiles can guide any collaborative filtering recommender system to proactively discover and suggest to a user many resources relevant to him, even if he has not explicitly searched for them.     

Image tag recommendation based on friendships

The tagging systems have been studied by many researchers in the past decade. Tagging methods have been widely used on the web for searching and recommending images. Social tags are the keywords annotated by users to the images, which contains the information for searching and classifying the images. Tag recommendation system allows mitigating the individual preferences to annotate and recommender images. However, irrelevant and noise tags are frequently included in tags. In this paper, we propose image tag recommendation based on the friends’ relationships in social network (TRboFS) to recommender tags for a new image, both the tags assigned to the favorite images and the friendships of the users who upload the image are employed to predict the tags of the images. Empirical analyses on real datasets show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to existing approaches.     

多子域随机森林在情境感知推荐中的应用研究

情境感知推荐系统通过增加情境信息来提高推荐精度,在实际应用中得到广泛的应用。然而,传统的情境感知推荐方法存在赋予情境因素相同权重,忽略了用户在不同情境下所偏好项目的不同,以及情境因素在推荐过程中所起的影响作用不同的问题。提出一种基于多子域随机森林算法的情境感知推荐方法。该方法对特征重要性按权值大小进行排序,将权值的取值区域分为多个大小相等的子区域,在这些子区域中随机选择特征,构造特征子空间来改进随机森林算法;通过改进的随机森林算法来分解并降低用户、项目和情境的特征维度;使用协同过滤推荐算法来进行冷链物流配载个性化推荐。对LDOS-CoMoDa和Cycle Share两个数据集进行仿真实验,结果表明该方法相比传统方法平均绝对误差减少近10%,有效地提高了推荐系统的预测精度,为情境感知推荐的应用提供借鉴。     

基于二分图划分联合聚类的协同过滤推荐算法

准确而积极地向用户提供他们可能感兴趣的信息或服务是推荐系统的主要任务。协同过滤是采用得最广泛的推荐算法之一,而数据稀疏的问题往往严重影响推荐质量。为了解决这个问题,提出了基于二分图划分联合聚类的协同过滤推荐算法。首先将用户与项目构建成二分图进行联合聚类,从而映射到低维潜在特征空间;其次根据聚类结果改进2种相似性计算策略:簇偏好相似性和评分相似性,并将二者相结合。基于结合的相似性,分别采用基于用户和项目的方法来获得对未知目标评分的预测。最后,将这些预测结果进行融合。实验结果表明,所提算法比最新的联合聚类协同过滤推荐算法具有更好的性能。     

协同过滤推荐系统综述

随着互联网和信息计算的飞速发展,衍生了海量数据,我们已经进入信息爆炸的时代。网络中各种信息量的指数型增长导致用户想要从大量信息中找到自己需要的信息变得越来越困难,信息过载问题日益突出。推荐系统在缓解信息过载问题中起着非常重要的作用,该方法通过研究用户的兴趣偏好进行个性化计算,由系统发现用户兴趣进而引导用户发现自己的信息需求。目前,推荐系统已经成为产业界和学术界关注、研究的热点问题,应用领域十分广泛。在电子商务、会话推荐、文章推荐、智慧医疗等多个领域都有所应用。传统的推荐算法主要包括基于内容的推荐、协同过滤推荐以及混合推荐。其中,协同过滤推荐是推荐系统中应用最广泛最成功的技术之一。该方法利用用户或物品间的相似度以及历史行为数据对目标用户进行推荐,因此存在用户冷启动和项目冷启动问题。此外,随着信息量的急剧增长,传统协同过滤推荐系统面对数据的快速增长会遇到严重的数据稀疏性问题以及可扩展性问题。为了缓解甚至解决这些问题,推荐系统研究人员进行了大量的工作。近年来,为了提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度,学者们开始关注推荐系统的多样性问题以及可解释性等问题。由于深度学习方法可以通过发现数据中用户和项目之间的非线性关系从而学习一个有效的特征表示,因此越来越受到推荐系统研究人员的关注。目前的工作主要是利用评分数据、社交网络信息以及其他领域信息等辅助信息,结合深度学习、数据挖掘等技术提高推荐效果、提升用户满意度。对此,本文首先对推荐系统以及传统推荐算法进行概述,然后重点介绍协同过滤推荐算法的相关工作。包括协同过滤推荐算法的任务、评价指标、常用数据集以及学者们在解决协同过滤算法存在的问题时所做的工作以及努力。最后提出未来的几个可研究方向。     

Topic-based ranking in Folksonomy via probabilistic model

Social tagging is an increasingly popular way to describe and classify documents on the web. However, the quality of the tags varies considerably since the tags are authored freely. How to rate the tags becomes an important issue. Most social tagging systems order tags just according to the input sequence with little information about the importance and relevance. This limits the applications of tags such as information search, tag recommendation, and so on. In this paper, we pay attention to finding the authority score of tags in the whole tag space conditional on topics and put forward a topic-sensitive tag ranking (TSTR) approach to rank tags automatically according to their topic relevance. We first extract topics from folksonomy using a probabilistic model, and then construct a transition probability graph. Finally, we perform random walk over the topic level on the graph to get topic rank scores of tags. Experimental results show that the proposed tag ranking method is both effective and efficient. We also apply tag ranking into tag recommendation, which demonstrates that the proposed tag ranking approach really boosts the performances of social-tagging related applications.