BITS Pilani

presentation
BITS Pilani
Pilani Campus

N.MEHALA
FACULTY,CS/IS GROUP

INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
CS F469
Second Semester 2014-15

4/14/2015

CS F469

2
BITS Pilani, Deemed to be University under Section 3 of UGC Act, 1956

What is Recommendation systems?

Recommendation systems are
programs which attempt to predict
items that a user may be interested in
These systems serve two important
functions:

They help users deal with the
information overload by giving
Recommendations
them recommendations of
products, etc.

They help businesses make
more profits, i.e., selling more
products.

Search

Items
Products, web sites, blogs, news items,
3
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Example applications

4
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

What book should I buy?

5
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

What news should I read?

6
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

The Recommendation Problem

We have a set of users U and a set of items S to
be recommended to the users.
Let p be an utility function that measures the
usefulness of item s (
S) to user u (
U), i.e.,
p:US R, where R is a totally ordered set
(e.g., non-negative integers or real numbers in
a range)
Objective
Learn p based on the past data
Use p to predict the utility value of each item s
( S) to each user u ( U)
7
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

As Prediction
Rating prediction, i.e., predict the rating score
that a user is likely to give to an item that s/he
has not seen or used before. E.g.,
rating on an unseen movie. In this case, the
utility of item s to user u is the rating given to s
by u.
Item prediction, i.e., predict a ranked list of items
that a user is likely to buy or use.

8
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Two basic approaches

Content-based recommendations:
The user will be recommended items similar to
the ones the user preferred in the past
Collaborative filtering (or collaborative
recommendations):
The user will be recommended items that
people with similar tastes and preferences liked
in the past.
Hybrids: Combine collaborative and contentbased methods.
9
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Content-Based
Recommender System

10
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Plan of action
Item profiles
likes

build

recommend

match

Red
Circles
Triangles

User profile
11
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Content-Based Recommendation
In content-based recommendations the system
tries to recommend items that matches the User
Profile.
The Profile is based on items user has liked in the
past or explicit interests that s/he defines.
A content-based recommender system matches
the profile of the item to the user profile to decide
on its relevancy to the user.

12
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Simple Example

update

Read

New books

Match

Recommender
Systems

User Profile

User Profile

recommendation

13
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Advantages
No need for data on other users
No cold-start or sparsity problem
Able to recommend to users with unique tastes
Able to recommend new and unpopular item
No first-rater problem

14
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Limitations of content-based approach

Finding the appropriate features
e.g., images, movies, music
Overspecialization
Never recommends items outside users
content profile
People might have multiple interests
Recommendations for new users
How to build a profile?
A new user, having very few ratings, would
not be able to get accurate recommendations.
15
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Collaborative Filtering
Consider user c
Find set D of other users whose ratings are
similar to cs ratings
Estimate users ratings based on ratings of
users in D
Similar

Estimate
Ratings

Set of other users

Ratings
16
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Limitation of Collaborative method

Users rating problem

Different users might use different scales
Sparsity (Long Tail problem)
The number of ratings already obtained is usually very small
compared to the number of ratings that need to be predicted
Scalability
System typically have to search millions of users and items, it causes
a serious scalability problem
However, these correlations will change when new users are added
Adaptability
Requirement of a user may change over time
New User Problem
Must first learn the users preferences from the ratings that the user
gives
New Item Problem
Until the new item is rated by a substantial number of users, the
recommender system would not be able to recommend it

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Hybrid Methods
Content-based and collaborative methods have
complementary strengths and weaknesses
Combine methods to obtain the best of both
Various hybrid approaches:
Apply both methods and combine recommendations
Use collaborative data as content
Use content-based predictor as another collaborator

18
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Search engines and

recommender systems

19
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Search Engines vs.

Recommender Systems
Search Engines
Goal answer users ad
hoc queries
Input user ad-hoc need
defined as a query
Output- ranked items
relevant to user need
(based on user
preferences???)
Methods - Mainly IR
based methods

Recommender Systems
Goal recommend services
or items to user
Input - user preferences
defined as a profile
Output - ranked items based
on user preferences
Methods variety of
methods, IR, ML

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Query Recommender
Content based or content ignorant or hybrid
recommender for queries using information
about documents

21
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Content-Boosted Collaborative Filtering

22
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Context-Based Recommender Systems

 The recommender system uses additional data about
the context of an item consumption.
 For example, in the case of a restaurant the time or
the location may be used to improve the
recommendation compared to what could be
performed without this additional source of
information.
 A restaurant recommendation for family celebration
should be different than a restaurant recommendation
for official party.

23
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

14.04.2015

Context-Based Recommender Systems:

Motivating Examples

 Recommend a vacation
 Winter vs. summer
 Recommend a purchase (e-retailer)
 Gift vs. for yourself

24
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

14.04.2015

Context-Based Recommender Systems

What simple recommendation techniques ignore?
 What is the user
when asking for a
recommendation?
 Where (and when) the user is
?
 What does the user
(e.g., improve his
knowledge or really buy a product)?
or with other
?
 Is the user
 Are there
products to choose or only
?

25
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Context-Based Recommender Systems

Major obstacle for contextual computing
 Obtain sufficient and reliable data describing the user context
 Selecting the right information, i.e., relevant in a particular
personalization task
 Understand the impact of contextual dimensions on the
personalization process
 Computational model the contextual dimension in a more
classical recommendation technology
 For instance: how to extend Collaborative Filtering to include
contextual dimensions?

26
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Evaluating Recommendations
Precision
Accuracy of predictions
Compare predictions with known ratings

Recommendation Quality
Top-n measures (e.g., Breese score)

Item-Set Coverage
Number of items/users for which system can make
predictions

27
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Evaluating Recommendations
Receiver operating characteristic (ROC)
Tradeoff curve between false positives and false
negatives
Predicted
class
Cat
Actual
class

Dog

Rabbit

Cat

Dog

Rabbit

11

Assuming the confusion matrix above,

its corresponding table of confusion,
for the cat class, would be:

5 true positives
(actual cats that
were correctly
classified as cats)

2 false positives
(dogs that were
incorrectly labeled
as cats)

17 true negatives
3 false negatives (all the remaining
animals, correctly
(cats that were
incorrectly marked classified as noncats)
as dogs)

28
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC)

It is a plot of the true positive rate against the false positive rate for
the different possible cutpoints of a test.
The false positive rate is FPR= .
Where FP is number of false positives, and TN is number of true negatives.

True positive rate (or sensitivity): TPR=TP/(TP+FN)

29
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus