Dynamic intent-aware iterative denoising network for session-based recommendation

Session-based recommendation aims to predict items that a user will interact with based on historical behaviors in anonymous sessions. It has long faced two challenges: (1) the dynamic change of user intents which makes user preferences towards items change over time; (2) the uncertainty of user behaviors which adds noise to hinder precise preference learning. They jointly preclude recommender system from capturing real intents of users. Existing methods have not properly solved these problems since they either ignore many useful factors like the temporal information when building item embeddings, or do not explicitly filter out noisy clicks in sessions. To tackle above issues, we propose a novel Dynamic Intent-aware Iterative Denoising Network (DIDN) for session-based recommendation. Specifically, to model the dynamic intents of users, we present a dynamic intent-aware module that incorporates item-aware, user-aware and temporal-aware information to learn dynamic item embeddings. A novel iterative denoising module is then devised to explicitly filter out noisy clicks within a session. In addition, we mine collaborative information to further enrich the session semantics. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DIDN. Specifically, DIDN obtains improvements over the best baselines by 1.66%, 1.75%, and 7.76% in terms of P@20 and 1.70%, 2.20%, and 10.48% in terms of MRR@20 on all datasets.     

A social recommendation method based on an adaptive neighbor selection mechanism

Recommender systems are techniques to make personalized recommendations of items to users. In e-commerce sites and online sharing communities, providing high quality recommendations is an important issue which can help the users to make effective decisions to select a set of items. Collaborative filtering is an important type of the recommender systems that produces user specific recommendations of the items based on the patterns of ratings or usage (e.g. purchases). However, the quality of predicted ratings and neighbor selection for the users are important problems in the recommender systems. Selecting suitable neighbors set for the users leads to improve the accuracy of ratings prediction in recommendation process. In this paper, a novel social recommendation method is proposed which is based on an adaptive neighbor selection mechanism. In the proposed method first of all, initial neighbors set of the users is calculated using clustering algorithm. In this step, the combination of historical ratings and social information between the users are used to form initial neighbors set for the users. Then, these neighbor sets are used to predict initial ratings of the unseen items. Moreover, the quality of the initial predicted ratings is evaluated using a reliability measure which is based on the historical ratings and social information between the users. Then, a confidence model is proposed to remove useless users from the initial neighbors of the users and form a new adapted neighbors set for the users. Finally, new ratings of the unseen items are predicted using the new adapted neighbors set of the users and the $top\_N$ interested items are recommended to the active user. Experimental results on three real-world datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art recommendation methods.     

Investigating and counteracting popularity bias in group recommendations

Popularity bias is an undesirable phenomenon associated with recommendation algorithms where popular items tend to be suggested over long-tail ones, even if the latter would be of reasonable interest for individuals. Such intrinsic tendencies of the recommenders may lead to producing ranked lists, in which items are not equally covered along the popularity tail. Although some recent studies aim to detect such biases of traditional algorithms and treat their effects on recommendations, the concept of popularity bias remains elusive for group recommender systems. Therefore, in this study, we focus on investigating popularity bias from the view of group recommender systems, which aggregate individual preferences to achieve recommendations for groups of users. We analyze various state-of-the-art aggregation techniques utilized in group recommender systems regarding their bias towards popular items. To counteract possible popularity issues in group recommendations, we adapt a traditional re-ranking approach that weighs items inversely proportional to their popularity within a group. Also, we propose a novel popularity bias mitigation procedure that re-ranks items by incorporating their popularity level and estimated group ratings in two distinct strategies. The first one aims to penalize popular items during the aggregation process highly and avoids bias better, while the second one puts more emphasis on group ratings than popularity and achieves a more balanced performance regarding conflicting goals of mitigating bias and boosting accuracy. Experiments performed on four real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that both strategies are more efficient than the adapted approach, and empowering aggregation techniques with one of these strategies significantly decreases their bias towards popular items while maintaining reasonable ranking accuracy.     

Personalized recommendation via user preference matching

Graph-based recommendation approaches use a graph model to represent the relationships between users and items, and exploit the graph structure to make recommendations. Recent graph-based recommendation approaches focused on capturing users’ pairwise preferences and utilized a graph model to exploit the relationships between different entities in the graph. In this paper, we focus on the impact of pairwise preferences on the diversity of recommendations. We propose a novel graph-based ranking oriented recommendation algorithm that exploits both explicit and implicit feedback of users. The algorithm utilizes a user-preference-item tripartite graph model and modified resource allocation process to match the target user with users who share similar preferences, and make personalized recommendations. The principle of the additional preference layer is to capture users’ pairwise preferences, provide detailed information of users for further recommendations. Empirical analysis of four benchmark datasets demonstrated that our proposed algorithm performs better in most situations than other graph-based and ranking-oriented benchmark algorithms.     

Dual disentanglement of user–item interaction for recommendation with causal embedding

To achieve personalized recommendations, the recommender system selects the items that users may like by learning the collected user–item interaction data. However, the acquisition and use of data usually form a feedback loop, which leads to recommender systems suffering from popularity bias. To solve this problem, we propose a novel dual disentanglement of user–item interaction for recommendation with causal embedding (DDCE). Different from the existing work, our innovation is we take into account double-end popularity bias from the user-side and the item-side. Firstly, we perform a causal analysis of the reasons for user–item interaction and obtain the causal embedding representation of each part according to the analysis results. Secondly, on the item-side, we consider the influence of item attributes on popularity to improve the reliability of the item popularity. Then, on the user-side, we consider the effect of the time series when obtaining users’ interest. We model the contrastive learning task to disentangle users’ long–short-term interests, which avoids the bias of long–short-term interests overlapping, and use the attention mechanism to realize the dynamic integration of users’ long–short-term interests. Finally, we realize the disentanglement of user–item interaction reasons by decoupling user interest and item popularity. We experiment on two real-world datasets (Douban Movie and KuaiRec) to verify the significance of DDCE, the average improvement of DDCE in three evaluation metrics (NDCG, HR, and Recall) compared to the state-of-the-art model are 5.1106% and 4.1277% (MF as the backbone), 3.8256% and 3.2790% (LightGCN as the backbone), respectively.     

A probabilistic music recommender considering user opinions and audio features

A recommender system has an obvious appeal in an environment where the amount of on-line information vastly outstrips any individual’s capability to survey. Music recommendation is considered a popular application area. In order to make personalized recommendations, many collaborative music recommender systems (CMRS) focus on capturing precise similarities among users or items based on user historical ratings. Despite the valuable information from audio features of music itself, however, few studies have investigated how to utilize information extracted directly from music for personalized recommendation in CMRS. In this paper, we describe a CMRS based on our proposed item-based probabilistic model, where items are classified into groups and predictions are made for users considering the Gaussian distribution of user ratings. In addition, this model has been extended for improved recommendation performance by utilizing audio features that help alleviate three well-known problems associated with data sparseness in collaborative recommender systems: user bias, non-association, and cold start problems in capturing accurate similarities among items. Experimental results based on two real-world data sets lead us to believe that content information is crucial in achieving better personalized recommendation beyond user ratings. We further show how primitive audio features can be combined into aggregate features for the proposed CRMS and analyze their influences on recommendation performance. Although this model was developed originally for music collaborative recommendation based on audio features, our experiment with the movie data set demonstrates that it can be applied to other domains.     

A Convolutional Attention Network for Unifying General and Sequential Recommenders

General recommenders and sequential recommenders are two modeling paradigms of recommender. The main focus of a general recommender is to identify long-term user preferences, while the user’s sequential behaviors are ignored and sequential recommenders try to capture short-term user preferences by exploring item-to-item relations, failing to consider general user preferences. Recently, better performance improvement is reported by combining these two types of recommenders. However, most of the previous works typically treat each item separately and assume that each user–item interaction in a sequence is independent. This may be a too simplistic assumption, since there may be a particular purpose behind buying the successive item in a sequence. In fact, a user makes a decision through two sequential processes, i.e., start shopping with a particular intention and then select a specific item which satisfies her/his preferences under this intention. Moreover, different users usually have different purposes and preferences, and the same user may have various intentions. Thus, different users may click on the same items with an attention on a different purpose. Therefore, a user’s behavior pattern is not completely exploited in most of the current methods and they neglect the distinction between users’ purposes and their preferences. To alleviate those problems, we propose a novel method named, CAN, which takes both users’ purposes and preferences into account for the next-item recommendation. We propose to use Purpose-Specific Attention Unit (PSAU) in order to discriminately learn the representations of user purpose and preference. The experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods.     

An impact of time and item influencer in collaborative filtering recommendations using graph-based model

Recommender Systems deal with the issue of overloading information by retrieving the most relevant sources in the wide range of web services. They help users by predicting their interests in many domains like e-government, social networks, e-commerce and entertainment. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most promising technique used in recommender systems to give suggestions based on liked-mind users’ preferences. Despite the widespread use of CF in providing personalized recommendation, this technique has problems including cold start, data sparsity and gray sheep. Eventually, these problems lead to the deterioration of the efficiency of CF. Most existing recommendation methods have been proposed to overcome the problems of CF. However, they fail to suggest the top-n recommendations based on the sequencing of the users’ priorities. In this research, to overcome the shortcomings of CF and current recommendation methods in ranking preference dataset, we have used a new graph-based structure to model the users’ priorities and capture the association between users and items. Users’ profiles are created based on their past and current interest. This is done because their interest can change with time. Our proposed algorithm keeps the preferred items of active user at the beginning of the recommendation list. This means these items come under top-n recommendations, which results in satisfaction among users. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm archives the significant improvement in comparison with CF and other proposed recommendation methods in terms of recall, precision, f-measure and MAP metrics using two benchmark datasets including MovieLens and Superstore.     

Personalized hybrid recommendation for group of users: Top-N multimedia recommender

Nowadays, the increasing demand for group recommendations can be observed. In this paper we address the problem of recommendation performance for groups of users (group recommendation). We focus on the performance of very Top-N recommendations, which are important when recommending the long lasting items (only a few such items are consumed per session, e.g. movie). To improve existing group recommenders we propose a mixed hybrid recommender for groups combining content-based and collaborative strategies. The principle of proposed group recommender is to generate content and collaborative recommendations for each user, apply an aggregation strategy to solve the group conflict preferences for the content and collaborative sets separately, and finally reorder the collaborative candidates based on the content-based ones. It is based on an idea that candidates recommended by both recommendation strategies at the same time are presumably more appropriate for the group than the candidates recommended by individual strategies. The evaluation is performed by several experiments in the multimedia domain (as typical representative for group recommendations). Both, online and offline experiments were performed in order to compare real users’ satisfaction to the standard group recommenders and also, to compare performance of proposed approach to the state-of-the-art recommenders based on the MovieLens dataset. Finally, we experimented with the proposed hybrid recommender to generate the recommendation for a group of size one (i.e. single user recommendation). Obtained results, support our hypothesis that proposed mixed hybrid approach improves the precision of the recommendation for groups of users and for the single-user recommendation respectively on very Top-N recommended items.     

Personalized Recommendation via Multi-dimensional Meta-paths Temporal Graph Probabilistic Spreading

Since meta-paths have the innate ability to capture rich structure and semantic information, meta-path-based recommendations have gained tremendous attention in recent years. However, how to composite these multi-dimensional meta-paths? How to characterize their dynamic characteristics? How to automatically learn their priority and importance to capture users' diverse and personalized preferences at the user-level granularity? These issues are pivotal yet challenging for improving both the performance and the interpretability of recommendations. To address these challenges, we propose a personalized recommendation method via Multi-Dimensional Meta-Paths Temporal Graph Probabilistic Spreading (MD-MP-TGPS). Specifically, we first construct temporal multi-dimensional graphs with full consideration of the interest drift of users, obsolescence and popularity of items, and dynamic update of interaction behavior data. Then we propose a dimension-free temporal graph probabilistic spreading framework via multi-dimensional meta-paths. Moreover, to automatically learn the priority and importance of these multi-dimensional meta-paths at the user-level granularity, we propose two boosting strategies for personalized recommendation. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets and the experimental results show that the proposed MD-MP-TGPS method outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods in such performance indicators as precision, recall, F1-score, hamming distance, intra-list diversity and popularity in terms of accuracy, diversity, and novelty.     

Collaborative filtering with facial expressions for online video recommendation

Online video recommender systems help users find videos suitable for their preferences. However, they have difficulty in identifying dynamic user preferences. In this study, we propose a new recommendation procedure using changes of users’ facial expressions captured every moment. Facial expressions portray the users’ actual emotions about videos. We can utilize them to discover dynamic user preferences. Further, because the proposed procedure does not rely on historical rating or purchase records, it properly addresses the new user problem, that is, the difficulty in recommending products to users whose past rating or purchase records are not available. To validate the recommendation procedure, we conducted experiments with footwear commercial videos. Experiment results show that the proposed procedure outperforms benchmark systems including a random recommendation, an average rating approach, and a typical collaborative filtering approach for recommendation to both new and existing users. From the results, we conclude that facial expressions are a viable element in recommendation.     

Evaluating collaborative filtering recommendations inside large learning object repositories

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms are techniques used by recommender systems to predict the utility of items for users based on the similarity among their preferences and the preferences of other users. The enormous growth of learning objects on the internet and the availability of preferences of usage by the community of users in the existing learning object repositories (LORs) have opened the possibility of testing the efficiency of CF algorithms on recommending learning materials to the users of these communities. In this paper we evaluated recommendations of learning resources generated by different well known memory-based CF algorithms using two databases (with implicit and explicit ratings) gathered from the popular MERLOT repository. We have also contrasted the results of the generated recommendations with several existing endorsement mechanisms of the repository to explore possible relations among them. Finally, the recommendations generated by the different algorithms were compared in order to evaluate whether or not they were overlapping. The results found here can be used as a starting point for future studies that account for the specific context of learning object repositories and the different aspects of preference in learning resource selection.     

Content recommendation with two-level TransE predictors and interaction-aware embedding enhancement: An information seeking behavior perspective

In community-based social media, users consume content from multiple communities and provide feedback. The community-related data reflect user interests, but they are poorly used as additional information to enrich user-content interaction for content recommendation in existing studies. This paper employs an information seeking behavior perspective to describe user content consumption behavior in community-based social media, therefore revealing the relations between user, community and content. Based on that, the paper proposes a Community-aware Information Seeking based Content Recommender (abbreviated as CISCRec) to use the relations for better modeling user preferences on content and increase the reasoning on the recommendation results. CISCRec includes two key components: a two-level TransE prediction framework and interaction-aware embedding enhancement. The two-level TransE prediction framework hierarchically models users’ preferences for content by considering community entities based on the TransE method. Interaction-aware embedding enhancement is designed based on the analysis of users’ continued engagement in online communities, aiming to add expressiveness to embeddings in the prediction framework. To verify the effectiveness of the model, the real-world Reddit dataset (4,868 users, 115,491 contents, 850 communities, and 602,025 interactions) is chosen for evaluation. The results show that CISCRec outperforms 8 common baselines by 9.33%, 4.71%, 42.13%, and 14.36% on average under the Precision, Recall, MRR, and NDCG respectively.     

Relevance-based language modelling for recommender systems

Relevance-Based Language Models, commonly known as Relevance Models, are successful approaches to explicitly introduce the concept of relevance in the statistical Language Modelling framework of Information Retrieval. These models achieve state-of-the-art retrieval performance in the pseudo relevance feedback task. On the other hand, the field of recommender systems is a fertile research area where users are provided with personalised recommendations in several applications. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of the Relevance Modelling framework to effectively suggest recommendations to a user. We also propose a probabilistic clustering technique to perform the neighbour selection process as a way to achieve a better approximation of the set of relevant items in the pseudo relevance feedback process. These techniques, although well known in the Information Retrieval field, have not been applied yet to recommender systems, and, as the empirical evaluation results show, both proposals outperform individually several baseline methods. Furthermore, by combining both approaches even larger effectiveness improvements are achieved.     

Building user profiles based on sequences for content and collaborative filtering

Modeling user profiles is a necessary step for most information filtering systems – such as recommender systems – to provide personalized recommendations. However, most of them work with users or items as vectors, by applying different types of mathematical operations between them and neglecting sequential or content-based information. Hence, in this paper we study how to propose an adaptive mechanism to obtain user sequences using different sources of information, allowing the generation of hybrid recommendations as a seamless, transparent technique from the system viewpoint. As a proof of concept, we develop the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) algorithm as a similarity metric to compare the user sequences, where, in the process of adapting this algorithm to recommendation, we include different parameters to control the efficiency by reducing the information used in the algorithm (preference filter), to decide when a neighbor is considered useful enough to be included in the process (confidence filter), to identify whether two interactions are equivalent (δ-matching threshold), and to normalize the length of the LCS in a bounded interval (normalization functions). These parameters can be extended to work with any type of sequential algorithm.We evaluate our approach with several state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms using different evaluation metrics measuring the accuracy, diversity, and novelty of the recommendations, and analyze the impact of the proposed parameters. We have found that our approach offers a competitive performance, outperforming content, collaborative, and hybrid baselines, and producing positive results when either content- or rating-based information is exploited.     

Exploiting context-awareness and multi-criteria decision making to improve items recommendation using a tripartite graph-based model

Integrating useful input information is essential to provide efficient recommendations to users. In this work, we focus on improving items ratings prediction by merging both multiple contexts and multiple criteria based research directions which were addressed separately in most existent literature. Throughout this article, Criteria refer to the items attributes, while Context denotes the circumstances in which the user uses an item. Our goal is to capture more fine grained preferences to improve items recommendation quality using users’ multiple criteria ratings under specific contextual situations. Therefore, we examine the recommenders’ data from the graph theory based perspective by representing three types of entities (users, contextual situations and criteria) as well as their relationships as a tripartite graph. Upon the assumption that contextually similar users tend to have similar interests for similar item criteria, we perform a high-order co-clustering on the tripartite graph for simultaneously partitioning the graph entities representing users in similar contextual situations and their evaluated item criteria. To predict cluster-based multi-criteria ratings, we introduce an improved rating prediction method that considers the dependency between users and their contextual situations, and also takes into account the correlation between criteria in the prediction process. The predicted multi-criteria ratings are finally aggregated into a single representative output corresponding to an overall item rating. To guide our investigation, we create a research hypothesis to provide insights about the tripartite graph partitioning and design clear and justified preliminary experiments including quantitative and qualitative analyzes to validate it. Further thorough experiments on the two available context-aware multi-criteria datasets, TripAdvisor and Educational, demonstrate that our proposal exhibits substantial improvements over alternative recommendations approaches.     

What makes a review a reliable rating in recommender systems?

The way that users provide feedback on items regarding their satisfaction varies among systems: in some systems, only explicit ratings can be entered; in other systems textual reviews are accepted; and in some systems, both feedback types are accommodated. Recommender systems can readily exploit explicit ratings in the rating prediction and recommendation formulation process, however textual reviews -which in the context of many social networks are in abundance and significantly outnumber numeric ratings- need to be converted to numeric ratings. While numerous approaches exist that calculate a user's rating based on the respective textual review, all such approaches may introduce errors, in the sense that the process of rating calculation based on textual reviews involves an uncertainty level, due to the characteristics of the human language, and therefore the calculated ratings may not accurately reflect the actual ratings that the corresponding user would enter. In this work (1) we examine the features of textual reviews, which affect the reliability of the review-to-rating conversion procedure, (2) we compute a confidence level for each rating, which reflects the uncertainty level for each conversion process, (3) we exploit this metric both in the users’ similarity computation and in the prediction formulation phases in recommender systems, by presenting a novel rating prediction algorithm and (4) we validate the accuracy of the presented algorithm in terms of (i) rating prediction accuracy, using widely-used recommender systems datasets and (ii) recommendations generated for social network user satisfaction and precision, where textual reviews are abundant.     

Enhancing sequential recommendation with contrastive Generative Adversarial Network

Sequential recommendation models a user’s historical sequence to predict future items. Existing studies utilize deep learning methods and contrastive learning for data augmentation to alleviate data sparsity. However, these existing methods cannot learn accurate high-quality item representations while augmenting data. In addition, they usually ignore data noise and user cold-start issues. To solve the above issues, we investigate the possibility of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with contrastive learning for sequential recommendation to balance data sparsity and noise. Specifically, we propose a new framework, Enhanced Contrastive Learning with Generative Adversarial Network for Sequential Recommendation (ECGAN-Rec), which models the training process as a GAN and recommendation task as the main task of the discriminator. We design a sequence augmentation module and a contrastive GAN module to implement both data-level and model-level augmentations. In addition, the contrastive GAN learns more accurate high-quality item representations to alleviate data noise after data augmentation. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced Transformer recommender based on GAN to optimize the performance of the model. Experimental results on three open datasets validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model and the ability of the model to balance data noise and data sparsity. Specifically, the improvement of ECGAN-Rec in two evaluation metrics (HR@N and NDCG@N) compared to the state-of-the-art model performance on the Beauty, Sports and Yelp datasets are 34.95%, 36.68%, and 13.66%, respectively. Our implemented model is available via https://github.com/nishawn/ECGANRec-master.     

Leveraging social influence based on users activity centers for point-of-interest recommendation

Recommender Systems (RSs) aim to model and predict the user preference while interacting with items, such as Points of Interest (POIs). These systems face several challenges, such as data sparsity, limiting their effectiveness. In this paper, we address this problem by incorporating social, geographical, and temporal information into the Matrix Factorization (MF) technique. To this end, we model social influence based on two factors: similarities between users in terms of common check-ins and the friendships between them. We introduce two levels of friendship based on explicit friendship networks and high check-in overlap between users. We base our friendship algorithm on users’ geographical activity centers. The results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on two real-world datasets. More specifically, our ablation study shows that the social model improves the performance of our proposed POI recommendation system by 31% and 14% on the Gowalla and Yelp datasets in terms of Precision@10, respectively.