A genetic algorithms-based hybrid recommender system of matrix factorization and neighborhood-based techniques

Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

Abstract—Recommender systems are often used to provide useful recommendations for users. They use previous history of the users-items interactions, e.g. purchase history and/or users rating on items, to provide a suitable recommendation list for any target user. They may also use contextual information available about items and users. Collaborative filtering algorithm and its variants are the most successful recommendation algorithms that have been applied to many applications. Collaborative filtering method works by first finding the most similar users (or items) for a target user (or items), and then building the recommendation lists. There is no unique evaluation metric to assess the performance of recommendations systems, and one often choose the one most appropriate for the application in hand. This paper compares the performance of a number of well-known collaborative filtering algorithms on movie recommendation. To this end, a number of performance criteria are used to test the algorithms. The algorithms are ranked for each evaluation metric and a rank aggregation method is used to determine the wining algorithm. Our experiments show that the probabilistic matrix factorization has the top performance in this dataset, followed by item-based and user-based collaborative filtering. Non-negative matrix factorization and Slope 1 has the worst performance among the considered algorithms.
 Keywords—Social networks analysis and mining, big data, recommender systems, collaborative filtering.

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have been extensively developed and widely deployed in various social websites, promoting products or services to the users of interest. Meanwhile, work has been attempted at poisoning attacks to CF recommender systems for distorting the recommend results to reap commercial or personal gains stealthily. While existing poisoning attacks have demonstrated their effectiveness with the offline social datasets, they are impractical when applied to the real setting on online social websites. This paper develops a novel and practical poisoning attack solution toward the CF recommender systems without knowing involved specific algorithms nor historical social data information a priori. Instead of directly attacking the unknown recommender systems, our solution performs certain operations on the social websites to collect a set of sampling data for use in constructing a surrogate model for deeply learning the inherent recommendation patterns. This surrogate model can estimate the item proximities, learned by the recommender systems. By attacking the surrogate model, the corresponding solutions (for availability and target attacks) can be directly migrated to attack the original recommender systems. Extensive experiments validate the generated surrogate model's reproductive capability and demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack upon various CF recommender algorithms.

Evaluation Of Recommendation System On A Movie Dataset

Collaborative filtering algorithms, such as matrix factorization techniques, are recently gaining momentum due to their promising performance on recommender systems. However, most collaborative filtering algorithms suffer from data sparsity. Active learning algorithms are effective in reducing the sparsity problem for recommender systems by requesting users to give ratings to some items when they enter the systems. In this paper, a new matrix factorization model, called Enhanced SVD (ESVD) is proposed, which incorporates the classic matrix factorization algorithms with ratings completion inspired by active learning. In addition, the connection between the prediction accuracy and the density of matrix is built to further explore its potentials. We also propose the Multi-layer ESVD, which learns the model iteratively to further improve the prediction accuracy. To handle the imbalanced data sets that contain far more users than items or more items than users, the Item-wise ESVD and User-wise ESVD are presented, respectively. The proposed methods are evaluated on the famous Netflix and Movielens data sets. Experimental results validate their effectiveness in terms of both accuracy and efficiency when compared with traditional matrix factorization methods and active learning methods.

A recommender system can effectively solve the problem of information overload in the era of big data. Recent research on recommender systems, specifically Collaborative Filtering, has focused on Matrix Factorization methods, which have been shown to have excellent performance. However, these methods do not pay attention to the influence of a user’s rating characteristics, which are especially important for the accuracy of prediction or recommendation. Therefore, in order to get better performance, we propose a novel method based on matrix factorization. We consider that the user’s rating score is composed of two parts: the real score, which is decided by the user’s preferences; and the bias score, which is decided by the user’s rating characteristics. We then analyze the user’s historical behavior to find his rating characteristics by using the matrix factorization technique and use them to adjust the final prediction results. Finally, by comparing with the latest algorithms on the open datasets, we verified that the proposed method can significantly improve the accuracy of recommender systems and achieve the best performance in terms of prediction accuracy criterion over other state-of-the-art methods.

Nowadays, collaborative filtering recommender systems have been widely deployed in many commercial companies to make profit. Neighborhood‐based collaborative filtering (CF) is common and effective. To date, despite its effectiveness, there has been little effort to explore their robustness and the impact of data poisoning attacks on their performance. Can the neighborhood‐based recommender systems be easily fooled? To this end, we shed light on the robustness of neighborhood‐based recommender systems and propose a novel data poisoning attack framework, encoding the purpose of attack and constraint against them. We first illustrate how to calculate the optimal data poisoning attack, namely, UNAttack. We inject a few well‐designed fake users into the recommender systems such that target items will be recommended to as many normal users as possible. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real‐world datasets to validate the effectiveness and the transferability of our proposed method. In addition, some interesting phenomena can be found. For example, (i) neighborhood‐based recommender systems with Euclidean distance‐based similarity have strong robustness and (ii) the fake users can be transferred to attack the state‐of‐the‐art CF recommender systems such as neural CF and Bayesian personalized ranking matrix factorization.

Recommender systems are used to generate meaningful recommendations to users based on their preferences, which will be determined following several approaches. This work targets Arab readers by providing accurate and reliable results that match their needs and desirability. Eventually, it will enhance the reading experience for any Arab readers. The main approach is to filter the recommendations, and this can be achieved either by Content-Based filtering or by Collaborative Filtering. The collaborative filtering techniques presented in this paper compute the similarity matrix between items and users' ratings, and then evaluate the recommendations for users. The techniques cover User-Based and Item-Based Collaborative Filtering, as well as Matrix Factorization through an SVD algorithm. A comparison between these techniques is presented in terms of the fitting and testing time, and accuracy. The KNN-based algorithms showed better performance than the matrix factorization method with respect to fitting and testing time. However, the matrix factorization (SVD) algorithm had the best results in terms of accuracy.

Recommender systems are collecting and analyzing user data to provide better user experience. However, several privacy concerns have been raised when a recommender knows user's set of items or their ratings. A number of solutions have been suggested to improve privacy of legacy recommender systems, but the existing solutions in the literature can protect either items or ratings only. In this paper, we propose a recommender system that protects both user's items and ratings. For this, we develop novel matrix factorization algorithms under local differential privacy (LDP). In a recommender system with LDP, individual users randomize their data themselves to satisfy differential privacy and send the perturbed data to the recommender. Then, the recommender computes aggregates of the perturbed data. This framework ensures that both user's items and ratings remain private from the recommender. However, applying LDP to matrix factorization typically raises utility issues with i) high dimensionality due to a large number of items and ii) iterative estimation algorithms. To tackle these technical challenges, we adopt dimensionality reduction technique and a novel binary mechanism based on sampling. We additionally introduce a factor that stabilizes the perturbed gradients. With MovieLens and LibimSeTi datasets, we evaluate recommendation accuracy of our recommender system and demonstrate that our algorithm performs better than the existing differentially private gradient descent algorithm for matrix factorization under stronger privacy requirements.

Recommender systems have become essential in the digital era to help users navigate overwhelming content. This study develops a book recommendation system using three collaborative filtering methods: user-based, item-based, and matrix factorization using singular value decomposition. We evaluate the system on a real-world dataset of 1,149,780 book ratings from 278,858 users across 271,360 books. A subset of 500 active users is used for experimental evaluation. The models are assessed using root mean square error and mean absolute error to measure rating prediction accuracy. The results show that the item-based collaborative filtering method achieves the best accuracy (root mean square error 7.362; mean absolute error 6.761), slightly outperforming the user-based approach (7.365; 6.809) and the matrix factorization method (7.643; 7.413). We analyze the results to understand the performance differences, noting the stability of item similarity as a key factor and the need for optimal tuning in the matrix factorization model. In conclusion, item-based collaborative filtering proved most effective for this context. This work provides insights into the comparative performance of foundational recommendation techniques and highlights practical considerations for improving book recommender systems.

Matrix factorization is one of the most popular techniques for prediction problems in the fields of intelligent systems and data mining. It has shown its effectiveness in many real-world applications such as recommender systems. As a collaborative filtering method, it gives users recommendations based on their previous preferences or ratings. Due to the extreme sparseness of the ratings matrix, active learning is used for eliciting ratings for a user to get better recommendations. In this paper, we propose a new matrix factorization model called Enhanced SVD ESVD which combines the classic matrix factorization method with a specific rating elicitation strategy. We evaluate the proposed ESVD method on the Movielens data set, and the experimental results suggest its effectiveness in terms of both accuracy and efficiency, when compared with traditional matrix factorization methods and active learning methods.

Collaborative and content-based filtering are the majorly used approaches towards implementing recommender systems which can successfully predict the item(s) to be recommended to users based upon their preferences. Each of the methods has its own advantages and disadvantages that are specific to the situation they are used in. The hybrid approach aims to combine both techniques in multiple ways to optimize results and overcome shortcomings. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach based recommendation engine to improve accuracy. While content based recommendations are made on the similarity of items’ attributes, collaborative recommendations are based on similarity of users. Collaborative filtering is achieved by matrix factorization technique. One of the most effective algorithms for matrix factorization: Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has been used to perform collaborative filtering and combined with content based model to predict the item ratings per user. The paper aims to achieve the final result with minimum possible errors as per user preferences and recommended items.

Collaborative filtering (CF) technique in recommender systems (RS) is a well-known and popular technique that exploits relationships between users or items to make product recommendations to an active user. The effectiveness of existing memory based algorithms depend on the similarity measure that is used to identify nearest neighbours. However, similarity measures utilize only the ratings of co-rated items while computing the similarity between a pair of users or items. In most of the e-commerce applications, the rating matrix is too sparse since even active users of an online system tend to rate only a few items of the entire set of items. Therefore, co-rated items among users are even sparser. Moreover, the ratings a user gives an individual item tells us nothing about his comprehensive interest without which the generated recommendations may not be satisfactory to a user. In order to be able to address these issues, a comprehensive study is made of the various existing measures of similarity in a collaborative filtering recommender system (CFRS) and a hierarchical categorization of products has been proposed to understand the interest of a user in a wider scope so as to provide better recommendations as well as to alleviate data sparsity.

With the rapid development of e-commerce, collaborative filtering recommendation system has been widely used in various network platforms. Using recommendation system to accurately predict customers’ preferences for goods can solve the problem of information overload faced by users and improve users’ dependence on the network platform. Because the recommendation system based on collaborative filtering technology has the ability to recommend more abstract or difficult to describe goods in words, the research related to collaborative filtering technology has attracted more and more attention. According to the past research, in collaborative filtering algorithm, if Pearson correlation coefficient is used, errors will occur under special circumstances. In this study, the normal recovery similarity measure is used to modify the similarity value to correct the error value of a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm. Based on this, a big data analysis method based on a modified collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm is proposed. This research implemented it in the cloud Hadoop environment, and measure the execution time with 2, 5 and 8 nodes. Then the research compared it with the execution time of a single machine, and analyze its speedup ratio and efficiency. The experimental results show that the execution time increases with the number of neighbors. When the number of nodes is 5 and 8, the execution time is greatly improved, which improves the efficiency of collaborative filtering algorithm and can cope with massive data in the future.

Recommender systems are powerful tools that filter and recommend content/information relevant to a given user. Collaborative filtering is the most popular technique used in building recommender systems and it has been successfully incorporated in many applications. These conventional recommendation systems require a minimum number of users, items, and ratings in order to provide effective recommendations. This results in the infamous cold-start problem where the system is not able to produce effective recommendations for new users. Recently, there has been an escalation in the popularity and usage of social networks, which persuades people to share their experiences in the form of reviews and ratings on social media. The components of social media such as the influence of friends, interests, and enjoyment create the opportunities to develop solutions for sparsity and cold start problems of recommendation systems. This paper aims to observe these patterns and analyze three of the existing social recommendation systems, SocialMF, SocialFD, and GraphRec. SocialMF and SocialFD algorithms are based on matrix factorization and distance metric learning respectively whereas GraphRec is an attention based deep learning model. Through extensive experimentation with the datasets that these algorithms were tested on and one new dataset, we compared the results based on evaluation metrics including Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). To investigate how trust impacts the performance of these models, we evaluated them by modifying the trust and social component. Experimental results show that there is no conclusive evidence that trust propagation plays a major part in these models. Moreover, these models show a slightly improved performance in the absence of trust statements.