We present collaborative similarity embedding (CSE), a unified framework that exploits comprehensive collaborative relations available in a user-item bipartite graph for representation learning and recommendation. In the proposed framework, we differentiate two types of proximity relations: direct proximity and k-th order neighborhood proximity. While learning from the former exploits direct user-item associations observable from the graph, learning from the latter makes use of implicit associations such as user-user similarities and item-item similarities, which can provide valuable information especially when the graph is sparse. Moreover, for improving scalability and flexibility, we propose a sampling technique that is specifically designed to capture the two types of proximity relations. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that CSE yields significantly better performance than state-of-the-art recommendation methods.
This analysis explores the temporal sequencing of objects in a movie trailer. Temporal sequencing of objects in a movie trailer (e.g., a long shot of an object vs intermittent short shots) can convey information about the type of movie, plot of the movie, role of the main characters, and the filmmakers cinematographic choices. When combined with historical customer data, sequencing analysis can be used to improve predictions of customer behavior. E.g., a customer buys tickets to a new movie and maybe the customer has seen movies in the past that contained similar sequences. To explore object sequencing in movie trailers, we propose a video convolutional network to capture actions and scenes that are predictive of customers' preferences. The model learns the specific nature of sequences for different types of objects (e.g., cars vs faces), and the role of sequences in predicting customer future behavior. We show how such a temporal-aware model outperforms simple feature pooling methods proposed in our previous works and, importantly, demonstrate the additional model explain-ability allowed by such a model.
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.
Recommender systems (RSs) have been the most important technology for increasing the business in Taobao, the largest online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform in China. The billion-scale data in Taobao creates three major challenges to Taobao's RS: scalability, sparsity and cold start. In this paper, we present our technical solutions to address these three challenges. The methods are based on the graph embedding framework. We first construct an item graph from users' behavior history. Each item is then represented as a vector using graph embedding. The item embeddings are employed to compute pairwise similarities between all items, which are then used in the recommendation process. To alleviate the sparsity and cold start problems, side information is incorporated into the embedding framework. We propose two aggregation methods to integrate the embeddings of items and the corresponding side information. Experimental results from offline experiments show that methods incorporating side information are superior to those that do not. Further, we describe the platform upon which the embedding methods are deployed and the workflow to process the billion-scale data in Taobao. Using online A/B test, we show that the online Click-Through-Rate (CTRs) are improved comparing to the previous recommendation methods widely used in Taobao, further demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed methods in Taobao's live production environment.
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.
Matrix factorization is one of the most efficient approaches in recommender systems. However, such algorithms, which rely on the interactions between users and items, perform poorly for "cold-users" (users with little history of such interactions) and at capturing the relationships between closely related items. To address these problems, we propose a neural personalized embedding (NPE) model, which improves the recommendation performance for cold-users and can learn effective representations of items. It models a user's click to an item in two terms: the personal preference of the user for the item, and the relationships between this item and other items clicked by the user. We show that NPE outperforms competing methods for top-N recommendations, specially for cold-user recommendations. We also performed a qualitative analysis that shows the effectiveness of the representations learned by the model.
Recommender systems (RSs) provide an effective way of alleviating the information overload problem by selecting personalized items for different users. Latent factors based collaborative filtering (CF) has become the popular approaches for RSs due to its accuracy and scalability. Recently, online social networks and user-generated content provide diverse sources for recommendation beyond ratings. Although {\em social matrix factorization} (Social MF) and {\em topic matrix factorization} (Topic MF) successfully exploit social relations and item reviews, respectively, both of them ignore some useful information. In this paper, we investigate the effective data fusion by combining the aforementioned approaches. First, we propose a novel model {\em \mbox{MR3}} to jointly model three sources of information (i.e., ratings, item reviews, and social relations) effectively for rating prediction by aligning the latent factors and hidden topics. Second, we incorporate the implicit feedback from ratings into the proposed model to enhance its capability and to demonstrate its flexibility. We achieve more accurate rating prediction on real-life datasets over various state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we measure the contribution from each of the three data sources and the impact of implicit feedback from ratings, followed by the sensitivity analysis of hyperparameters. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and efficacy of our proposed model and its extension.
The pervasive use of social media provides massive data about individuals' online social activities and their social relations. The building block of most existing recommendation systems is the similarity between users with social relations, i.e., friends. While friendship ensures some homophily, the similarity of a user with her friends can vary as the number of friends increases. Research from sociology suggests that friends are more similar than strangers, but friends can have different interests. Exogenous information such as comments and ratings may help discern different degrees of agreement (i.e., congruity) among similar users. In this paper, we investigate if users' congruity can be incorporated into recommendation systems to improve it's performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of embedding congruity related information into recommendation systems.
Recommender systems are one of the most successful applications of data mining and machine learning technology in practice. Academic research in the field is historically often based on the matrix completion problem formulation, where for each user-item-pair only one interaction (e.g., a rating) is considered. In many application domains, however, multiple user-item interactions of different types can be recorded over time. And, a number of recent works have shown that this information can be used to build richer individual user models and to discover additional behavioral patterns that can be leveraged in the recommendation process. In this work we review existing works that consider information from such sequentially-ordered user- item interaction logs in the recommendation process. Based on this review, we propose a categorization of the corresponding recommendation tasks and goals, summarize existing algorithmic solutions, discuss methodological approaches when benchmarking what we call sequence-aware recommender systems, and outline open challenges in the area.
In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded state-of-the-art performance on several tasks. Although some recent works have focused on combining deep learning with recommendation, we highlight three issues of existing works. First, most works perform deep content feature learning and resort to matrix factorization, which cannot effectively model the highly complex user-item interaction function. Second, due to the difficulty on training deep neural networks, existing models utilize a shallow architecture, and thus limit the expressive potential of deep learning. Third, neural network models are easy to overfit on the implicit setting, because negative interactions are not taken into account. To tackle these issues, we present a generic recommender framework called Neural Collaborative Autoencoder (NCAE) to perform collaborative filtering, which works well for both explicit feedback and implicit feedback. NCAE can effectively capture the relationship between interactions via a non-linear matrix factorization process. To optimize the deep architecture of NCAE, we develop a three-stage pre-training mechanism that combines supervised and unsupervised feature learning. Moreover, to prevent overfitting on the implicit setting, we propose an error reweighting module and a sparsity-aware data-augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that NCAE can significantly advance the state-of-the-art.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.