The proliferation of online news creates a need for filtering interesting articles. Compared to other products, however, recommending news has specific challenges: news preferences are subject to trends, users do not want to see multiple articles with similar content, and frequently we have insufficient information to profile the reader. In this paper, we introduce a class of news recommendation systems based on context trees. They can provide high-quality news recommendations to anonymous visitors based on present browsing behaviour. Using an unbiased testing methodology, we show that they make accurate and novel recommendations, and that they are sufficiently flexible for the challenges of news recommendation.
We focus on a class of recommender systems based on context trees. Usually, these trees are used to estimate Variable-order Markov Models (VMM). VMMs have been originally applied to lossless data compression, in which a long sequence of symbols is represented as a set of contexts and statistics about symbols are combined into a predictive model @cite_12 . VMMs have many other applications @cite_18 .
@cite_18 @cite_12
236111108 2004789217 2009974779 2515144511
We present a novel probabilistic approach for fitting a statistical model to an image. A 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) of faces is interpreted as a generative (Top-Down) Bayesian model. Random Forests are used as noisy detectors (Bottom-Up) for the face and facial landmark positions. The Top-Down and Bottom-Up parts are then combined using a Data-Driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method (DDMCMC). As core of the integration, we use the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which has two main advantages. First, the algorithm can handle unreliable detections and therefore does not need the detectors to take an early and possible wrong hard decision before fitting. Second, it is open for integration of various cues to guide the fitting process. Based on the proposed approach, we implemented a completely automatic, pose and illumination invariant face recognition application. We are able to train and test the building blocks of our application on different databases. The system is evaluated on the Multi-PIE database and reaches state of the art performance. We propose a coupled hidden Markov model (CHMM) approach to video-realistic speech animation, which realizes realistic facial animations driven by speaker independent continuous speech. Different from hidden Markov model (HMM)-based animation approaches that use a single-state chain, we use CHMMs to explicitly model the subtle characteristics of audio-visual speech, e.g., the asynchrony, temporal dependency (synchrony), and different speech classes between the two modalities. We derive an expectation maximization (EM)-based A V conversion algorithm for the CHMMs, which converts acoustic speech into decent facial animation parameters. We also present a video-realistic speech animation system. The system transforms the facial animation parameters to a mouth animation sequence, refines the animation with a performance refinement process, and finally stitches the animated mouth with a background facial sequence seamlessly. We have compared the animation performance of the CHMM with the HMMs, the multi-stream HMMs and the factorial HMMs both objectively and subjectively. Results show that the CHMMs achieve superior animation performance. The ph-vi-CHMM system, which adopts different state variables (phoneme states and viseme states) in the audio and visual modalities, performs the best. The proposed approach indicates that explicitly modelling audio-visual speech is promising for speech animation. In this paper, we present a novel method to explore semantically meaningful visual information and identify the discriminative spatiotemporal relationships between them for real-time activity recognition. Our approach infers human activities using continuous egocentric (first-person-view) videos of object manipulations in an industrial setup. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a random forest that unifies randomization, discriminative relationships mining and a Markov temporal structure. Discriminative relationships mining helps us to model relations that distinguish different activities, while randomization allows us to handle the large feature space and prevents over-fitting. The Markov temporal structure provides temporally consistent decisions during testing. The proposed random forest uses a discriminative Markov decision tree, where every nonterminal node is a discriminative classifier and the Markov structure is applied at leaf nodes. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on a new challenging video dataset of assembling a pump system. Sparseness of user-to-item rating data is one of the major factors that deteriorate the quality of recommender system. To handle the sparsity problem, several recommendation techniques have been proposed that additionally consider auxiliary information to improve rating prediction accuracy. In particular, when rating data is sparse, document modeling-based approaches have improved the accuracy by additionally utilizing textual data such as reviews, abstracts, or synopses. However, due to the inherent limitation of the bag-of-words model, they have difficulties in effectively utilizing contextual information of the documents, which leads to shallow understanding of the documents. This paper proposes a novel context-aware recommendation model, convolutional matrix factorization (ConvMF) that integrates convolutional neural network (CNN) into probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF). Consequently, ConvMF captures contextual information of documents and further enhances the rating prediction accuracy. Our extensive evaluations on three real-world datasets show that ConvMF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation models even when the rating data is extremely sparse. We also demonstrate that ConvMF successfully captures subtle contextual difference of a word in a document. Our implementation and datasets are available at http: dm.postech.ac.kr ConvMF.