Analyzing Potential of Personal Values-Based User Modeling for Long Tail Item Recommendation

Highly skewed long-tail item distribution is very common in recommendation systems. It significantly hurts model performance on tail items. To improve tail-item recommendation, we conduct research to transfer knowledge from head items to tail items, leveraging the rich user feedback in head items and the semantic connections between head and tail items. Specifically, we propose a novel dual transfer learning framework that jointly learns the knowledge transfer from both model-level and item-level: 1. The model-level knowledge transfer builds a generic meta-mapping of model parameters from few-shot to many-shot model. It captures the implicit data augmentation on the model-level to improve the representation learning of tail items. 2. The item-level transfer connects head and tail items through item-level features, to ensure a smooth transfer of meta-mapping from head items to tail items. The two types of transfers are incorporated to ensure the learned knowledge from head items can be well applied for tail item representation learning in the long-tail distribution settings. Through extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, results show that our proposed dual transfer learning framework significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for tail item recommendation in hit ratio and NDCG. It is also very encouraging that our framework further improves head items and overall performance on top of the gains on tail items.

A large number of practical applications of the recommendation system found that the novelty of the recommendation results and the user satisfaction are more closely related, making the novelty recommendation recently widely concerned and studied. Many novelty recommendation algorithms used the popularity of the item to measure novelty, but this method is too simple, and the change of item popularity is more reflective of its novelty. According to the product life cycle theory (PLC), this study proposed a novelty recommendation algorithm that recommends item that be not popular now and may be popular in the future to improve the novelty of the recommendation results, The time change of the popularity of the items to be recommended is analyzed, and the future popularity of the items are predicted by analogy. Two strategies for selecting recommended selection are selecting future popular items (the predicting popularity-based filtering Algorithm, PP algorithm) and excluding future recession items (the Excluding Recession-based filtering algorithm, ER algorithm), according to the definition of novelty of the item, recommended the novelty items to the target user. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was verified through an offline experiment. Results indicate that PP algorithm can significantly improve the accuracy and novelty, but seriously sacrifice the coverage and reduce the ability of the recommendation system to mine the long tail items when the number of alternative items N is small, the novelty of the recommendation list of the ER algorithm is remarkably higher than that of traditional algorithms, the novelty is high when the quantity of alternative sets reaches around 350, where the average popularity of the recommendation list declines by 40%, and the coverage is elevated by 150%, thereby improving the ability of the proposed system to extract all kinds of items. This study serves as reference for the improvement of user satisfaction with recommendation systems.

This paper analyzes the effects of entrepreneurs’ personal values and their entrepreneurial attitudes, as forms of intellectual capital, on the innovative behavior of small businesses. The influence of personal values is examined through Schwartz's value theory and entrepreneurial attitudes via assessments associated with risk taking and personal autonomy. A model of structural equations using the Partial Least Squares technique was applied to a database composed of 191 small business owners in Paraguay. The results show that personal values of conservation and self-enhancement in the entrepreneur have a direct negative effect on innovation. It is also noted that entrepreneurial attitudes, such as openness to change and self-transcendence, have a mediating role in the positive impact of values on innovation. The article contributes to the literature by showing that some elements of intellectual capital, such as entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurs’ personal values, interact to influence innovation in small businesses.

A vital research concern for a personalised recommender system is to target items in the long tail. Studies have shown that sales of the e-commerce platform possess a long-tail character, and niche items in the long tail are challenging to be involved in the recommendation list. Since niche items are defined by the niche market, which is a small market segment, traditional recommendation algorithms focused more on popular items promotion and they do not apply to the niche market. In this article, we aim to find the best users for each niche item and proposed a topic-based hierarchical Bayesian linear regression model for niche item recommendation. We first identify niche items and build niche item subgroups based on descriptive information of items. Moreover, we learn a hierarchical Bayesian linear regression model for each niche item subgroup. Finally, we predict the relevance between users and niche items to provide recommendations. We perform a series of validation experiments on Yahoo Movies dataset and compare the performance of our approach with a set of representative baseline recommender algorithms. The result demonstrates the superior performance of our recommendation approach for niche items.

The article investigates the interactional effects of internal and external university learning environments, and the influence of personal values, in the satisfaction formation process of international postgraduate students from Asia. Past research on student satisfaction has been narrowly focused on certain aspects of the university internal environment such as teaching, learning and support services. While acknowledging the impact of the internal learning environment on student satisfaction, the article argues that the external community environment, where students spend most of their academic life, has a much stronger influence on their satisfaction. It is also argued that students' personal values have a mediating influence on the impact on student satisfaction of the internal and external learning environments. A sample of 411 international postgraduate business students from five Australian universities is used in the study. Structural equation modelling is used to analyse the data. Practical implications for universities are provided.

When we buy items in online stores, it is common to face recommended items that meet our interest. These recommendation system help users not only to find out related items, but also find new things that may interest users. Recommendation system has been widely studied and various models has been suggested such as, collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. Though collaborative filtering shows good performance for predicting users preference, there are some conditions where collaborative filtering cannot be applied. Sparsity in user data causes problems in comparing users. Systems which are newly starting or companies having small number of users are also hard to apply collaborative filtering. Content-based filtering should be used to support this conditions, but content-based filtering has some drawbacks and weakness which are tendency of recommending similar items, and keeping history of a user makes recommendation simple and not able to follow up users preference changes. To overcome this drawbacks and limitations, we suggest weighted window assisted user history based recommendation system, which captures user’s purchase patterns and applies them to window weight adjustment. The system is capable of following current preference of a user, removing useless recommendation and suggesting items which cannot be simply found by users. To examine the performance under user and data sparsity environment, we applied data from start-up trading company. Through the experiments, we evaluate the operation of the proposed recommendation system.

The success of "infinite-inventory" retailers such as Amazon.com and Netflix has been largely attributed to a "long tail" phenomenon. Although the majority of their inventory is not in high demand, these niche products, unavailable at limited-inventory competitors, generate a significant fraction of total revenue in aggregate. In addition, tail product availability can boost head sales by offering consumers the convenience of "one-stop shopping" for both their mainstream and niche tastes. However, most of existing recommender systems, especially collaborative filter based methods, can not recommend tail products due to the data sparsity issue. It has been widely acknowledged that to recommend popular products is easier yet more trivial while to recommend long tail products adds more novelty yet it is also a more challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel suite of graph-based algorithms for the long tail recommendation. We first represent user-item information with undirected edge-weighted graph and investigate the theoretical foundation of applying Hitting Time algorithm for long tail item recommendation. To improve recommendation diversity and accuracy, we extend Hitting Time and propose efficient Absorbing Time algorithm to help users find their favorite long tail items. Finally, we refine the Absorbing Time algorithm and propose two entropy-biased Absorbing Cost algorithms to distinguish the variation on different user-item rating pairs, which further enhances the effectiveness of long tail recommendation. Empirical experiments on two real life datasets show that our proposed algorithms are effective to recommend long tail items and outperform state-of-the-art recommendation techniques.

PurposeThe study aims to investigate how personal values (PVS) influence research self-efficacy (RSE) among academics in public universities in Tanzania.Design/methodology/approachA cross-sectional design was utilized by the study to gather data once through structured questionnaires administered to 247 academic staff from four public universities in Tanzania.FindingsGenerally, the results show that PVS positively and significantly influence RSE in universities. Specifically, OPC has β value of 0.284 and p < 0.001, SEFN has β = 0.352 and p < 0.001 and CONS has a β = 0.198 and p = 0.003.Practical implicationsUniversity management should include PVS as among the criteria for recruitment of academic staff, as it determines their confidence in engaging in research.Originality/valueThe findings of this study broaden the applicability of Schwartz human values theory in Tanzania’s universities. Moreover, by carrying out empirical research on the influence of PVS on RSE in developing context such as Tanzania, the study contributes to the body of literature on PVS and RSE.

This article focuses on the influence of personal values (PVs) on entrepreneurial intention (EI) and new venture creation (NVC). The analysis is based on Schwartz’s PV theory and assumes that entrepreneurship is a process. A longitudinal analysis was conducted using partial least squares structural equation modelling with data from two surveys in which the same individuals were interviewed in 2010 and 2023. The findings provide valuable insights into the role played by PVs in the relationship between EI and NVC. This contributes to a deeper understanding of why, over time, a substantial proportion of individuals with EIs fail to initiate a business. Furthermore, the results provide empirical support relevant to the ongoing debate concerning stability, versus change, in PVs over time.

Autoencoder-based methods have achieved significant performance on item recommendation. However, they may not perform well on tail items due to the ignorance of the items’ popularity bias. As a response, in this paper, we focus on tail items and propose a novel adversarial learning method for tail recommendation (ALTRec). In our ALTRec, the generator (i.e., AutoRec) not only reconstructs the input well, but also minimizes the (any two-user) similarity difference between the input stage and the output stage to keep users’ interaction relationships unchanged. And the discriminator maps the inputs and outputs of the generator to a same semantic space for scoring the similarity and maximizes the similarity difference as the target, and will identify some unsatisfactory predictions, especially on tail items. In order to preserve the similarity, the generator will pay more attention to the tail items compared with the previous autoencoder-based methods. An ablation study validates the effectiveness of preserving the two-user similarity, as well as the adversarial learning strategy in our ALTRec. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our ALTRec significantly boosts the performance on tail items compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

This study aims to discuss how to form AI (Artificial Intelligence) ethical behavior with insight into the personal and organizational values of prospective accountants. This was a quantitative survey method. The sampling technique with a saturated sample was used as the research sample. Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis was conducted on 421 data points using WarpPLS software. The study results show that organizational and personal values significantly positively affect the intention of prospective accountant students to engage in AI ethics. Organizational values have a positive effect on the personal values of prospective accounting students. Intentions had a significant effect on AI ethics. Personal values did not play a role in mediating the impact of organizational values on intentions toward AI ethics. Intention succeeds in mediating the influence of personal values on the intention to engage in AI ethics among prospective accountant students. The findings referred to are very applicable to be implemented in different cultural settings due to the personal and organizational values tend to be implemented in general situation and condition. The findings provide universal outlook that values within organizations have an essential role in enhancing future accountants to be ethical in respect to AI.

The long-tail phenomenon tells us that there are many items in the tail. However, not all tail items are the same. Each item acquires different kinds of users. Some items are loved by the general public, while some items are consumed by eccentric fans. In this paper, we propose a novel metric, item eccentricity, to incorporate this difference between consumers of the items. Eccentric items are defined as items that are consumed by eccentric users. We used this metric to analyze two real-world datasets of music and movies and observed the characteristics of items in terms of eccentricity. The results showed that our defined eccentricity of an item does not change much over time, and classified eccentric and noneccentric items present significantly distinct characteristics. The proposed metric effectively separates the eccentric and noneccentric items mixed in the tail, which could not be done with the previous measures, which only consider the popularity of items.

Context-aware Recommender Systems aim to provide users with the most adequate recommendations for their current situation. However, an exact context obtained from a user could be too specific and may not have enough data for accurate rating prediction. This is known as the data sparsity problem. Moreover, often user preference representation depends on the domain or the specific recommendation approach used. Therefore, a big effort is required to change the method used. In this paper we present a new approach for contextual pre-filtering (i.e. using the current context to select a relevant subset of data). Our approach can be used with existing recommendation algorithms. It is based on two ontologies: Recommender System Context ontology, which represents the context, and Contextual Ontological User Profile ontology, which represents user preferences. We evaluated our approach through an offline study which showed that when used with well-known recommendation algorithms it can significantly improve the accuracy of prediction.

In the recommendation system, the collaborative filtering algorithm is widely used. However, there are lots of problems which need to be solved in recommendation field, such as low precision, the long tail of items. In this paper, we design an algorithm called FSTS for solving the low precision and the long tail. We adopt stability variables and time-sensitive factors to solve the problem of user's interest drift, and improve the accuracy of prediction. Experiments show that, compared with Item-CF, the precision, the recall, the coverage and the popularity have been significantly improved by FSTS algorithm. At the same time, it can mine long tail items and alleviate the phenomenon of the long tail.

User preferences are usually dynamic in real-world recommender systems, and a user»s historical behavior records may not be equally important when predicting his/her future interests. Existing recommendation algorithms -- including both shallow and deep approaches -- usually embed a user»s historical records into a single latent vector/representation, which may have lost the per item- or feature-level correlations between a user»s historical records and future interests. In this paper, we aim to express, store, and manipulate users» historical records in a more explicit, dynamic, and effective manner. To do so, we introduce the memory mechanism to recommender systems. Specifically, we design a memory-augmented neural network (MANN) integrated with the insights of collaborative filtering for recommendation. By leveraging the external memory matrix in MANN, we store and update users» historical records explicitly, which enhances the expressiveness of the model. We further adapt our framework to both item- and feature-level versions, and design the corresponding memory reading/writing operations according to the nature of personalized recommendation scenarios. Compared with state-of-the-art methods that consider users» sequential behavior for recommendation, e.g., sequential recommenders with recurrent neural networks (RNN) or Markov chains, our method achieves significantly and consistently better performance on four real-world datasets. Moreover, experimental analyses show that our method is able to extract the intuitive patterns of how users» future actions are affected by previous behaviors.