We propose a general formulation for continuous treatment recommendation problems in settings with clinical survival data, which we call the Deep Survival Dose Response Function (DeepSDRF). That is, we consider the problem of learning the conditional average dose response (CADR) function solely from historical data in which unobserved factors (confounders) affect both observed treatment and time-to-event outcomes. The estimated treatment effect from DeepSDRF enables us to develop recommender algorithms with explanatory insights. We compared two recommender approaches based on random search and reinforcement learning and found similar performance in terms of patient outcome. We tested the DeepSDRF and the corresponding recommender on extensive simulation studies and two empirical databases: 1) the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) and 2) the eICU Research Institute (eRI) database. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that confounders are taken into consideration for addressing the continuous treatment effect with observational data in a medical context.
In this work, we aim to consider the application of contrastive learning in the scenario of the recommendation system adequately, making it more suitable for recommendation task. We propose a learning paradigm called supervised contrastive learning(SCL) to support the graph convolutional neural network. Specifically, we will calculate the similarity between different nodes in user side and item side respectively during data preprocessing, and then when applying contrastive learning, not only will the augmented views be regarded as the positive samples, but also a certain number of similar samples will be regarded as the positive samples, which is different with SimCLR that treats other samples in a batch as negative samples. We apply SCL on the most advanced LightGCN. In addition, in order to consider the uncertainty of node interaction, we also propose a new data augment method called node replication. Empirical research and ablation study on Gowalla, Yelp2018, Amazon-Book datasets prove the effectiveness of SCL and node replication, which improve the accuracy of recommendations and robustness to interactive noise.
Recommender systems aim to recommend new items to users by learning user and item representations. In practice, these representations are highly entangled as they consist of information about multiple factors, including user's interests, item attributes along with confounding factors such as user conformity, and item popularity. Considering these entangled representations for inferring user preference may lead to biased recommendations (e.g., when the recommender model recommends popular items even if they do not align with the user's interests). Recent research proposes to debias by modeling a recommender system from a causal perspective. The exposure and the ratings are analogous to the treatment and the outcome in the causal inference framework, respectively. The critical challenge in this setting is accounting for the hidden confounders. These confounders are unobserved, making it hard to measure them. On the other hand, since these confounders affect both the exposure and the ratings, it is essential to account for them in generating debiased recommendations. To better approximate hidden confounders, we propose to leverage network information (i.e., user-social and user-item networks), which are shown to influence how users discover and interact with an item. Aside from the user conformity, aspects of confounding such as item popularity present in the network information is also captured in our method with the aid of \textit{causal disentanglement} which unravels the learned representations into independent factors that are responsible for (a) modeling the exposure of an item to the user, (b) predicting the ratings, and (c) controlling the hidden confounders. Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed model for debiasing recommender systems.
Influenced by the stunning success of deep learning in computer vision and language understanding, research in recommendation has shifted to inventing new recommender models based on neural networks. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing neural recommender models, which generalize and surpass traditional recommender models owing to the strong representation power of neural networks. In this survey paper, we conduct a systematic review on neural recommender models, aiming to summarize the field to facilitate future progress. Distinct from existing surveys that categorize existing methods based on the taxonomy of deep learning techniques, we instead summarize the field from the perspective of recommendation modeling, which could be more instructive to researchers and practitioners working on recommender systems. Specifically, we divide the work into three types based on the data they used for recommendation modeling: 1) collaborative filtering models, which leverage the key source of user-item interaction data; 2) content enriched models, which additionally utilize the side information associated with users and items, like user profile and item knowledge graph; and 3) context enriched models, which account for the contextual information associated with an interaction, such as time, location, and the past interactions. After reviewing representative works for each type, we finally discuss some promising directions in this field, including benchmarking recommender systems, graph reasoning based recommendation models, and explainable and fair recommendations for social good.
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized recommendations, recommender systems still suffer from several challenges, such as data sparsity and cold start. In recent years, generating recommendations with the knowledge graph as side information has attracted considerable interest. Such an approach can not only alleviate the abovementioned issues for a more accurate recommendation, but also provide explanations for recommended items. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey of knowledge graph-based recommender systems. We collect recently published papers in this field and summarize them from two perspectives. On the one hand, we investigate the proposed algorithms by focusing on how the papers utilize the knowledge graph for accurate and explainable recommendation. On the other hand, we introduce datasets used in these works. Finally, we propose several potential research directions in this field.
Many current applications use recommendations in order to modify the natural user behavior, such as to increase the number of sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the final recommendation objective and the classical setup where recommendation candidates are evaluated by their coherence with past user behavior, by predicting either the missing entries in the user-item matrix, or the most likely next event. To bridge this gap, we optimize a recommendation policy for the task of increasing the desired outcome versus the organic user behavior. We show this is equivalent to learning to predict recommendation outcomes under a fully random recommendation policy. To this end, we propose a new domain adaptation algorithm that learns from logged data containing outcomes from a biased recommendation policy and predicts recommendation outcomes according to random exposure. We compare our method against state-of-the-art factorization methods, in addition to new approaches of causal recommendation and show significant improvements.
Explainable Recommendation refers to the personalized recommendation algorithms that address the problem of why -- they not only provide the user with the recommendations, but also make the user aware why such items are recommended by generating recommendation explanations, which help to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, persuasiveness, and user satisfaction of recommender systems. In recent years, a large number of explainable recommendation approaches -- especially model-based explainable recommendation algorithms -- have been proposed and adopted in real-world systems. In this survey, we review the work on explainable recommendation that has been published in or before the year of 2018. We first high-light the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation itself in terms of three aspects: 1) We provide a chronological research line of explanations in recommender systems, including the user study approaches in the early years, as well as the more recent model-based approaches. 2) We provide a taxonomy for explainable recommendation algorithms, including user-based, item-based, model-based, and post-model explanations. 3) We summarize the application of explainable recommendation in different recommendation tasks, including product recommendation, social recommendation, POI recommendation, etc. We devote a chapter to discuss the explanation perspectives in the broader IR and machine learning settings, as well as their relationship with explainable recommendation research. We end the survey by discussing potential future research directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area.
Providing model-generated explanations in recommender systems is important to user experience. State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely ignored recently due to the availability of vast amount of data and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors and the knowledge is helpful for providing informed explanations regarding the recommended items. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning framework to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation, and based on the embedded knowledge base, a soft matching algorithm is proposed to generate personalized explanations for the recommended items. Experimental results on real-world e-commerce datasets verified the superior recommendation performance and the explainability power of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
Recommender systems are widely used in big information-based companies such as Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Netflix. A recommender system deals with the problem of information overload by filtering important information fragments according to users' preferences. In light of the increasing success of deep learning, recent studies have proved the benefits of using deep learning in various recommendation tasks. However, most proposed techniques only aim to target individuals, which cannot be efficiently applied in group recommendation. In this paper, we propose a deep learning architecture to solve the group recommendation problem. On the one hand, as different individual preferences in a group necessitate preference trade-offs in making group recommendations, it is essential that the recommendation model can discover substitutes among user behaviors. On the other hand, it has been observed that a user as an individual and as a group member behaves differently. To tackle such problems, we propose using an attention mechanism to capture the impact of each user in a group. Specifically, our model automatically learns the influence weight of each user in a group and recommends items to the group based on its members' weighted preferences. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets. Our model significantly outperforms baseline methods and shows promising results in applying deep learning to the group recommendation problem.
To address the sparsity and cold start problem of collaborative filtering, researchers usually make use of side information, such as social networks or item attributes, to improve recommendation performance. This paper considers the knowledge graph as the source of side information. To address the limitations of existing embedding-based and path-based methods for knowledge-graph-aware recommendation, we propose Ripple Network, an end-to-end framework that naturally incorporates the knowledge graph into recommender systems. Similar to actual ripples propagating on the surface of water, Ripple Network stimulates the propagation of user preferences over the set of knowledge entities by automatically and iteratively extending a user's potential interests along links in the knowledge graph. The multiple "ripples" activated by a user's historically clicked items are thus superposed to form the preference distribution of the user with respect to a candidate item, which could be used for predicting the final clicking probability. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Ripple Network achieves substantial gains in a variety of scenarios, including movie, book and news recommendation, over several state-of-the-art baselines.