The study proposes a personalised session-based recommender system that embeds items by using Word2Vec and sequentially updates the session and user embeddings with the hierarchicalization and aggregation of item embeddings. To process a recommendation request, the system constructs a real-time user embedding that considers users’ general preferences and sequential behaviour to handle short-term changes in user preferences with a low computational cost. The system performance was experimentally evaluated in terms of the accuracy, diversity, and novelty of the ranking of recommended items and the training and prediction times of the system for three different datasets. The results of these evaluations were then compared with those of the five baseline systems. According to the evaluation experiment, the proposed system achieved a relatively high recommendation accuracy compared with baseline systems and the diversity and novelty scores of the proposed system did not fall below 90% for any dataset. Furthermore, the training times of the Word2Vec-based systems, including the proposed system, were shorter than those of FPMC and GRU4Rec. The evaluation results suggest that the proposed recommender system succeeds in keeping the computational cost for training low while maintaining high-level recommendation accuracy, diversity, and novelty.

To find the exact items from the massive patent resources for users is a matter of great urgency. Although the recommender systems have shot this problem to a certain extent, there are still some challenging problems, such as tracking user interests and improving the recommendation quality when the rating matrix is extremely sparse. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Collaborative Filtering Auto-Encoder for the top-N recommendation. This method employs Auto-Encoders to extract the item's features, converts a high-dimensional sparse vector into a low-dimensional dense vector, and then uses the dense vector for similarity calculation. At the same time, to make the recommendation list closer to the user's recent interests, we divide the recommendation weight into time-based and recent similarity-based weights. In fact, the proposed method is an improved, item-based collaborative filtering model with more flexible components. Experimental results show that the method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art top-N recommendation methods by a significant margin on standard evaluation metrics.

Nowadays recommender systems (RS) keep drawing attention from academia, and collaborative filtering (CF) is the most successful technique for building RS. To overcome the inherent limitation, which is referred to as data sparsity in CF, various solutions are proposed to incorporate additional social information into recommendation processes, such as trust networks. However, existing methods suffer from multi-source data integration (i.e., fusion of social information and ratings), which is the basis for similarity calculation of user preferences. To this end, we propose a social collaborative filtering method based on novel trust metrics. Firstly, we use Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to learn the associations between social information and user ratings while considering the underlying social network structures. Secondly, we measure the direct-trust values between neighbors by representing multi-source data as user ratings on popular items, and then calculate the indirect-trust values based on trust propagations. Thirdly, we employ all trust values to create a social regularization in user-item rating matrix factorization in order to avoid overfittings. The experiments on real datasets show that our approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods on usage of multi-source data to alleviate data sparsity.

Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most popular approaches to building Recommender systems (RS) and has been extensively implemented in many online applications. But it still suffers from the new user cold start problem that users have only a small number of items interaction or purchase records in the system, resulting in poor recommendation performance. Thus, we design a new similarity model which can fully utilize the limited rating information of cold users. We first construct a new metric, Popularity-Mean Squared Difference, considering the influence of popular items, average difference between two user's common ratings and non-numerical information of ratings. Moreover, the second new metric, Singularity-Difference, presents the deviation degree of favor to items between two users. It considers the distribution of the similarity degree of co-ratings between two users as weight to adjust the deviation degree. Finally, we take account of user's personal rating preferences through introducing the mean and variance of user ratings. Experiment results based on three real-life datasets of MovieLens, Epinions and Netflix demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms seven popular similarity methods in terms of MAE, precision, recall and F1-Measure under new user cold start condition.

We prove generalization error bounds of classes of low-rank matrices with some norm constraints for collaborative filtering tasks. Our bounds are tighter, compared to known bounds using rank or the related quantity only, by taking the additional L1 and L∞ constraints into account. Also, we show that our bounds on the Rademacher complexity of the classes are optimal.

We consider online linear optimization over symmetric positive semi-definite matrices, which has various applications including the online collaborative filtering. The problem is formulated as a repeated game between the algorithm and the adversary, where in each round t the algorithm and the adversary choose matrices Xt and Lt, respectively, and then the algorithm suffers a loss given by the Frobenius inner product of Xt and Lt. The goal of the algorithm is to minimize the cumulative loss. We can employ a standard framework called Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) for designing algorithms, where we need to choose an appropriate regularization function to obtain a good performance guarantee. We show that the log-determinant regularization works better than other popular regularization functions in the case where the loss matrices Lt are all sparse. Using this property, we show that our algorithm achieves an optimal performance guarantee for the online collaborative filtering. The technical contribution of the paper is to develop a new technique of deriving performance bounds by exploiting the property of strong convexity of the log-determinant with respect to the loss matrices, while in the previous analysis the strong convexity is defined with respect to a norm. Intuitively, skipping the norm analysis results in the improved bound. Moreover, we apply our method to online linear optimization over vectors and show that the FTRL with the Burg entropy regularizer, which is the analogue of the log-determinant regularizer in the vector case, works well.

With the ever-increasing number of web services registered in service communities, many users are apt to find their interested web services through various recommendation techniques, e.g., Collaborative Filtering (i.e., CF)-based recommendation. Generally, CF-based recommendation approaches can work well, when a target user has similar friends or the target services (i.e., services preferred by the target user) have similar services. However, when the available user-service rating data is very sparse, it is possible that a target user has no similar friends and the target services have no similar services; in this situation, traditional CF-based recommendation approaches fail to generate a satisfying recommendation result. In view of this challenge, we combine Social Balance Theory (abbreviated as SBT; e.g., “enemy's enemy is a friend” rule) and CF to put forward a novel data-sparsity tolerant recommendation approach Ser_RecSBT+CF. During the recommendation process, a pruning strategy is adopted to decrease the searching space and improve the recommendation efficiency. Finally, through a set of experiments deployed on a real web service quality dataset WS-DREAM, we validate the feasibility of our proposal in terms of recommendation accuracy, recall and efficiency. The experiment results show that our proposed Ser_RecSBT+CF approach outperforms other up-to-date approaches.

Collaborative filtering with only implicit feedbacks has become a quite common scenario (e.g. purchase history, click-through log, and page visitation). This kind of feedback data only has a small portion of positive instances reflecting the user's interaction. Such characteristics pose great challenges to dealing with implicit recommendation problems. In this letter, we take full advantage of matrix factorization and relative preference to make the recommendation model more scalable and flexible. In addition, we propose to take into consideration the concept of covisitation which captures the underlying relationships between items or users. To this end, we propose the algorithm Integrated Collaborative Filtering for Implicit Feedback incorporating Covisitation (ICFIF-C) to integrate matrix factorization and collaborative ranking incorporating the covisitation of users and items simultaneously to model recommendation with implicit feedback. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on three standard datasets.

User-based and item-based collaborative filtering (CF) are two of the most important and popular techniques in recommender systems. Although they are widely used, there are still some limitations, such as not being well adapted to the sparsity of data sets, failure to consider the hierarchical structure of the items, and changes in users' interests when calculating the similarity of items. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose an evolutionary approach based on hierarchical structure for dynamic recommendation system named Hierarchical Temporal Collaborative Filtering (HTCF). The main contribution of the paper is displayed in the following two aspects. One is the exploration of hierarchical structure between items to improve similarity, and the other is the improvement of the prediction accuracy by utilizing a time weight function. A unique feature of our method is that it selects neighbors mainly based on hierarchical structure between items, which is more reliable than co-rated items utilized in traditional CF. To the best of our knowledge, there is little previous work on researching CF algorithm by combining object implicit or latent object-structure relations. The experimental results show that our method outperforms several current recommendation algorithms on recommendation accuracy (in terms of MAE).

Nowadays, with the development of online social networks (OSN), a mass of online social information has been generated in OSN, which has triggered research on social recommendation. Collaborative filtering, as one of the most popular techniques in social recommendation, faces several challenges, such as data sparsity, cold-start users and prediction quality. The motivation of our work is to deal with the above challenges by effectively combining collaborative filtering technology with social information. The trust relationship has been identified as a useful means of using social information to improve the quality of recommendation. In this paper, we propose a trust-based recommendation approach which uses GlobalTrust (GT) to represent the trust value among users as neighboring nodes. A matrix factorization based on singular value decomposition is used to get a trust network built on the GT value. The recommendation results are obtained through a modified random walk algorithm called GlobalTrustWalker. Through experiments on a real-world sparser dataset, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can better utilize users' social trust information and improve the recommendation accuracy on cold-start users.

Recommender systems, which provide users with recommendations of content suited to their needs, have received great attention in today's online business world. However, most recommendation approaches exploit only a single source of input data and suffer from the data sparsity problem and the cold start problem. To improve recommendation accuracy in this situation, additional sources of information, such as friend relationship and user-generated tags, should be incorporated in recommendation systems. In this paper, we revise the user-based collaborative filtering (CF) technique, and propose two recommendation approaches fusing user-generated tags and social relations in a novel way. In order to evaluate the performance of our approaches, we compare experimental results with two baseline methods: user-based CF and user-based CF with weighted friendship similarity using the real datasets (Last.fm and Movielens). Our experimental results show that our methods get higher accuracy. We also verify our methods in cold-start settings, and our methods achieve more precise recommendations than the compared approaches.

With the emergence of Web 2.0, social tagging systems become highly popular in recent years and thus form the so-called folksonomies. Personalized tag recommendation in social tagging systems is to provide a user with a ranked list of tags for a specific resource that best serves the user's needs. Many existing tag recommendation approaches assume that users are independent and identically distributed. This assumption ignores the social relations between users, which are increasingly popular nowadays. In this paper, we investigate the role of social relations in the task of tag recommendation and propose a personalized collaborative filtering algorithm. In addition to the social annotations made by collaborative users, we inject the social relations between users and the content similarities between resources into a graph representation of folksonomies. To fully explore the structure of this graph, instead of computing similarities between objects using feature vectors, we exploit the method of random-walk computation of similarities, which furthermore enable us to model a user's tag preferences with the similarities between the user and all the tags. We combine both the collaborative information and the tag preferences to recommend personalized tags to users. We conduct experiments on a dataset collected from a real-world system. The results of comparative experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art tag recommendation algorithms in terms of prediction quality measured by precision, recall and NDCG.

Due to the distributed nature, mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are vulnerable to various attacks, resulting in distrusted communications. To achieve trusted communications, it is important to build trusted routes in routing algorithms in a self-organizing and decentralized fashion. This paper proposes a trusted routing to locate and to preserve trusted routes in MANETs. Instead of using a hard security mechanism, we employ a new dynamic trust mechanism based on multiple constraints and collaborative filtering. The dynamic trust mechanism can effectively evaluate the trust and obtain the precise trust value among nodes, and can also be integrated into existing routing protocols for MANETs, such as ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR). As an example, we present a trusted routing protocol, based on dynamic trust mechanism, by extending DSR, in which a node makes a routing decision based on the trust values on its neighboring nodes, and finally, establish a trusted route through the trust values of the nodes along the route in MANETs. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through extensive simulations.

As the multimedia contents market continues its rapid expansion, the amount of image contents used in mobile phone services, digital libraries, and catalog service is increasing remarkably. In spite of this rapid growth, users experience high levels of frustration when searching for the desired image. Even though new images are profitable to the service providers, traditional collaborative filtering methods cannot recommend them. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose feature-based collaborative filtering (FBCF) method to reflect the user's most recent preference by representing his purchase sequence in the visual feature space. The proposed approach represents the images that have been purchased in the past as the feature clusters in the multi-dimensional feature space and then selects neighbors by using an inter-cluster distance function between their feature clusters. Various experiments using real image data demonstrate that the proposed approach provides a higher quality recommendation and better performance than do typical collaborative filtering and content-based filtering techniques.

Recommender System (RS) predicts user's ratings towards items, and then recommends highly-predicted items to user. In recent years, RS has been playing more and more important role in the agent research field. There have been a great deal of researches trying to apply agent technology to RS. Collaborative Filtering, one of the most widely used approach to predict user's ratings in Recommender System, predicts a user's rating towards an item by aggregating ratings given by users who have similar preference to that user. In existing approaches, user similarity is often computed on the whole set of items. However, because the number of items is often very large and so is the diversity among items, users who have similar preference in one category may have totally different judgement on items of another kind. In order to deal with this problem, we propose a method to cluster items, so that inside a cluster, similarity between users does not change significantly from item to item. After the item clustering phase, when predicting rating of a user towards an item, we only aggregate ratings of users who have similarity preference to that user inside the cluster of that item. Experiments evaluating our approach are carried out on the real dataset taken from MovieLens, a movies recommendation web site. Experiment results suggest that our approach can improve prediction accuracy compared to existing approaches.

Nowadays, customers spend much time and effort in finding the best suitable goods since more and more information is placed on-line. To save their time and effort in searching the goods they want, a customized recommender system is required. In this paper we present an improved neighbor selection algorithm that exploits a graph approach. The graph approach allows us to exploit the transitivity of similarities. The algorithm searches more efficiently for set of influential customers with respect to a given customer. We compare the proposed recommendation algorithm with other neighbor selection methods. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other methods.

The growth of the Internet has resulted in an increasing need for personalized information systems. The paper describes an autonomous agent, the Web Robot Agent or WebBot, which integrates with the web and acts as a personal recommendation system that cooperates with the user in order to identify interesting pages. The Apriori algorithm extracts the characteristics of the web pages in the form of association words that are semantically related and mines a bag of association words. Using hybrid components from collaborative filtering and content-based filtering, this hybrid recommendation system can overcome the shortcomings associated with traditional recommendation systems. In this paper, we present an improved recommendation system, which uses the user preference mining through hybrid 2-way filtering. The proposed method was tested on a database, and its effectiveness compared with existent methods was proven in on-line experiments.

A method is presented for selecting items asked for new users to input their preference rates on those items in recommendation systems based on the collaborative filtering. Optimal item selection is formulated by an integer programming problem and we solve it by using a kind of the Hopfield-network-like scheme for interior point methods.