Introduction to Recommender System

Guo, Guangming
guogg.good@gmail.com
Outline

• Background & Definition

• Some history worth noting
• Various applications
• Main-stream approach
• Evaluation
• Some resources

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Outline

• Background & Definition

– Related areas
– Challenges
– Paradigms
• Some history worth noting
• Various applications
• Main-stream approach
• Evaluation
• Some resources

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Become clear with basic concepts

• First step of learning

• Building blocks of new ideas

• Define the rules to play with

• Prerequisites for communication

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Definition of Recommender Systems

• Also named recommendation systems

• A subclass of information filtering system that seek to predict
the 'rating' or 'preference' that a user would give to an item
(such as music, books, or movies) or social element (e.g. peop
le or groups) they had not yet considered, using a model built
from the characteristics of an item (content-based approache
s) or the user's social environment (collaborative filtering app
roaches). --http://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender

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More truth

• Important vertical technique in data mining

• One of the most success solution for industry

• Became an independent research area in 1990s

– Many highly reputed academic conferences such as SIGIR, KDD, ICML, WWW, E
MNLP et al. have it as their subtopics.
– RecSys is fully devoted to this area
• Data mining/machine learning approach
– 1) specifying heuristics that define the utility function and empirically validatin
g its performance
– 2) estimating the utility function that optimizes certain performance criterion,
such as the mean square error.

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Chanllenges

• Cold start
• Long tail
• Data sparsity
• Scalability
• Social & Temporal
• Context-aware
• Personality-aware
• Being accuracy is not enough

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Related Research Area

• Cognitive science
• Text mining
• Natural Language Processing
• Information retrieval
• Machine learning
• Association mining
• Approximation theory
• Management science
• Consumer choice in marketing

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Paradigm of RecSys

• Content-based recommendations:
– recommended items similar to the ones the user preferred in the past;
• Collaborative recommendations:
– recommended items that people with similar tastes and preferences liked in th
e past;
• Knowledge-based recommendations:
– recommended items based existing knowledge models that fit the needs of us
ers
• Hybrid approaches:
– Combination of various input data or/and composition various mechanism

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Background

• Universe Problem in Information Age

– Information overload
– From SE to Recsys
– pull vs. push
– Web 1.0 vs. web 2.0
• Leverage the existing user generated data
– User profile
– Behavior history on the web,Rating
– Click through data, browse data
• Great benefits(win-win)
– Help users find valuable information
– Help business make more profits

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Outline

• Background & Definition

• Some history worth noting
– Netflix prize
• Various applications
• Main-stream approach
• Evaluation
• Some resources

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A peak in the history

• Research on collaborative filtering algorithm reached a peak d

uring the Netflix movie recommendation competition

• October 2, 2006 ~ September 21, 2009

• RMSE
– Must outperform baseline by 10%

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The Million Dollar Programming Prize

• The Netflix Prize

– Greatly energize the research in Recsys
– Last from 2006 to 2009
• Finalist: BellKor’s Pragamatic Chaos team
– A joint-team
– Andreas Töscher and Michael Jahrer ( Commendo Research &Consulting Gmb
H), originally team BigChaos
– Robert Bell, and Chris Volinsky (AT& T), Yehuda Koren (Yahoo),originally team B
ellKor
– Martin Piotte and Martin Chabbert, originally team Pragmatic Theory
• The ensemble Team
– The most accurate algorithm in 2007 used an ensemble method of 107 differe
nt algorithmic approaches

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Outline

• Background & Definition

• Some history worth noting
• Various applications
• Main-stream approach
• Evaluation
• Some resources

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Existing applications

• News/Article recommendation
• Targeted Advertisement
• Tags Recommendation
• Mobile Recommendation

• E-commerce
– Books, movies, music…

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Benefits

• Alternative to Search Engine

• Boost the profit

– Amazon et al.

• Better user experience

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Outline

• Background & Definition

• Some history worth noting
• Various applications
• Main-stream approach
– Content-based
– Collaborative filtering
• Evaluation
• Some resources

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Content-based

• Simple compute the similarity

– Cosine similarity or pearson correlation coefficient
– TF-IDF

• Utilize dimensionality reduction

– LDA

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Collaborative filtering

• Association mining
• Memory-based
– Nearest-neighbors
• Model-based
– Latent fator model

• Some comparison
– Space & time
– Theory foundation and interpretability

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Latent factor model

•  LSI, pLSA, LDA, latent class model, Topic model et al.

• A method based on matrix factorization/decomposition

where R is the rating matrix, P and Q are sub-matrix after dim

ension reduction
An low-rank approximation of the original matrix

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Computations

•  Traditional SVD
– Needs a simple method to complete the matrix
– Cost on the completed dense matrix is very high

• Situation changed in 2006 after the Netflix Prize

– Simon Funk
– Defined a cost function on the training data
•
• To avoid overfitting, add regularization term

• Gradient descent to optimize C(p,q)

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Outline

• Background & Definition

• Some history worth noting
• Various applications
• Main-stream approach
• Evaluation
• Some resources

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Evaluation Criterion

• User satisfaction by quesionnaire

• Precision
– RMSE
– Top-k
• Coverage
• Diversity
• Novelty
• Serendipity
– Originally thinking recommendation has non-sense
• …

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Outline

• Background & Definition

• Some history worth noting
• Various applications
• Main-stream approach
• Evaluation
• Some resources

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葫芦项亮

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Resources

• www.recsyswiki.com

• 各大推荐引擎资料汇总 by 大魁
– http://blog.csdn.net/lzt1983/article/details/7914536

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