Nowadays, spatial data are ubiquitous in various fields of science, such as transportation and the social Web. A recent research direction in analyzing spatial data is to provide means for "exploratory analysis" of such data where analysts are guided towards interesting options in consecutive analysis iterations. Typically, the guidance component learns analyst's preferences using her explicit feedback, e.g., picking a spatial point or selecting a region of interest. However, it is often the case that analysts forget or don't feel necessary to explicitly express their feedback in what they find interesting. Our approach captures implicit feedback on spatial data. The approach consists of observing mouse moves (as a means of analyst's interaction) and also the explicit analyst's interaction with data points in order to discover interesting spatial regions with dense mouse hovers. In this paper, we define, formalize and explore Interesting Dense Regions (IDRs) which capture preferences of analysts, in order to automatically find interesting spatial highlights. Our approach involves a polygon-based abstraction layer for capturing preferences. Using these IDRs, we highlight points to guide analysts in the analysis process. We discuss the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach through realistic examples and experiments on Airbnb and Yelp datasets.
Online recommendation approaches can also be considered as an information highlighting approach where recommended items count as highlights. Most recommendation algorithms are space-agnostic and do not take into account the spatial information. While few approaches focus on the spatial dimension @cite_7 @cite_24 @cite_23 , they still lack the evolutionary feedback capturing. Moreover, most recommendation methods miss result diversification'', i.e., highlights may not be effective due to overlaps.
@cite_24 @cite_23 @cite_7
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Recommender systems solve an information filtering task. They suggest data objects that seem likely to be relevant to the user based upon previous choices that this user has made. A geographic recommender system recommends items from a library of georeferenced objects such as photographs of touristic sites. A widely-used approach to recommending consists in suggesting the most popular items within the user community. However, these approaches are not able to handle individual differences between users. We ask how to identify less popular geographic objects that are nevertheless of interest to a specific user. Our approach is based on user-based collaborative filtering in conjunction with an prototypical model of geographic places (heatmaps). We discuss four different measures of similarity between users that take into account the spatial semantic derived from the spatial behavior of a user community. We illustrate the method with a real-world use case: recommendations of georeferenced photographs from the public website Panoramio. The evaluation shows that our approach achieves a better recall and precision for the first ten items than recommendations based on the most popular geographic items. While recommendation approaches exploiting different input sources have started to proliferate in the literature, an explicit study of the effect of the combination of heterogeneous inputs is still missing. On the other hand, in this context there are sides to recommendation quality requiring further characterisation and methodological research - a gap that is acknowledged in the field. We present a comparative study on the influence that different types of information available in social systems have on item recommendation. Aiming to identify which sources of user interest evidence - tags, social contacts, and user-item interaction data - are more effective to achieve useful recommendations, and in what aspect, we evaluate a number of content-based, collaborative filtering, and social recommenders on three datasets obtained from Delicious, Last.fm, and MovieLens. Aiming to determine whether and how combining such information sources may enhance over individual recommendation approaches, we extend the common accuracy-oriented evaluation practice with various metrics to measure further recommendation quality dimensions, namely coverage, diversity, novelty, overlap, and relative diversity between ranked item recommendations. We report empiric observations showing that exploiting tagging information by content-based recommenders provides high coverage and novelty, and combining social networking and collaborative filtering information by hybrid recommenders results in high accuracy and diversity. This, along with the fact that recommendation lists from the evaluated approaches had low overlap and relative diversity values between them, gives insights that meta-hybrid recommenders combining the above strategies may provide valuable, balanced item suggestions in terms of performance and non-performance metrics. Recommender systems are being widely applied in many application settings to suggest products, services, and information items to potential consumers. Collaborative filtering, the most successful recommendation approach, makes recommendations based on past transactions and feedback from consumers sharing similar interests. A major problem limiting the usefulness of collaborative filtering is the sparsity problem, which refers to a situation in which transactional or feedback data is sparse and insufficient to identify similarities in consumer interests. In this article, we propose to deal with this sparsity problem by applying an associative retrieval framework and related spreading activation algorithms to explore transitive associations among consumers through their past transactions and feedback. Such transitive associations are a valuable source of information to help infer consumer interests and can be explored to deal with the sparsity problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted an experimental study using a data set from an online bookstore. We experimented with three spreading activation algorithms including a constrained Leaky Capacitor algorithm, a branch-and-bound serial symbolic search algorithm, and a Hopfield net parallel relaxation search algorithm. These algorithms were compared with several collaborative filtering approaches that do not consider the transitive associations: a simple graph search approach, two variations of the user-based approach, and an item-based approach. Our experimental results indicate that spreading activation-based approaches significantly outperformed the other collaborative filtering methods as measured by recommendation precision, recall, the F-measure, and the rank score. We also observed the over-activation effect of the spreading activation approach, that is, incorporating transitive associations with past transactional data that is not sparse may "dilute" the data used to infer user preferences and lead to degradation in recommendation performance. Diversity has been identified as one of the key dimensions of recommendation utility that should be considered besides the overall accuracy of the system. A common diversification approach is to rerank results produced by a baseline recommendation engine according to a diversification criterion. The intent-aware framework is one of the frameworks that has been proposed for recommendations diversification. It assumes existence of a set of aspects associated with items, which also represent user intentions, and the framework promotes diversity across the aspects to address user expectations more accurately. In this paper we consider item-based collaborative filtering and suggest that the traditional view of item similarity is lacking a user perspective. We argue that user preferences towards different aspects should be reflected in recommendations produced by the system. We incorporate the intent-aware framework into the item-based recommendation algorithm by injecting personalised intent-aware covariance into the item similarity measure, and explore the impact of such change on the performance of the algorithm. Our experiments show that the proposed method improves both accuracy and diversity of recommendations, offering better accuracy diversity tradeoff than existing solutions.