Predicting personalized sequential behavior is a key task for recommender systems. In order to predict user actions such as the next product to purchase, movie to watch, or place to visit, it is essential to take into account both long-term user preferences and sequential patterns (i.e., short-term dynamics). Matrix Factorization and Markov Chain methods have emerged as two separate but powerful paradigms for modeling the two respectively. Combining these ideas has led to unified methods that accommodate long- and short-term dynamics simultaneously by modeling pairwise user-item and item-item interactions. In spite of the success of such methods for tackling dense data, they are challenged by sparsity issues, which are prevalent in real-world datasets. In recent years, similarity-based methods have been proposed for (sequentially-unaware) item recommendation with promising results on sparse datasets. In this paper, we propose to fuse such methods with Markov Chains to make personalized sequential recommendations. We evaluate our method, Fossil, on a variety of large, real-world datasets. We show quantitatively that Fossil outperforms alternative algorithms, especially on sparse datasets, and qualitatively that it captures personalized dynamics and is able to make meaningful recommendations.
In order to tackle implicit feedback data where only positive signals (e.g. purchases, clicks, thumbs-up) are observed, both neighborhood- and model-based methods have been extended. Recently, Ning proposed SLIM to learn an item-item similarity matrix, which has shown to outperform a series of state-of-the-art recommendation approaches @cite_10 . Kabbur further explored the low-rank property of the similarity matrix to handle sparse datasets @cite_2 . Since similarity (or neighborhood) relationships are learned from the data, these methods overcome the rigidity of using a predefined similarity metric. On the other hand, MF has also been extended in several ways including point-wise methods that inherently assume non-observed feedback to be negative @cite_3 @cite_27 , and pair-wise methods like BPR-MF @cite_21 that are based on a more realistic assumption that positive feedback should only be more preferable' than non-observed feedback.
@cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_10
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Implicit feedbacks have recently received much attention in recommendation communities due to their close relationship with real industry problem settings. However, most works only exploit users’ homogeneous implicit feedbacks such as users’ transaction records from “bought” activities, and ignore the other type of implicit feedbacks like examination records from “browsed” activities. The latter are usually more abundant though they are associated with high uncertainty w.r.t. users’ true preferences. In this paper, we study a new recommendation problem called heterogeneous implicit feedbacks (HIF), where the fundamental challenge is the uncertainty of the examination records. As a response, we design a novel preference learning algorithm to learn a confidence for each uncertain examination record with the help of transaction records. Specifically, we generalize Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR), a seminal pairwise learning algorithm for homogeneous implicit feedbacks, and learn the confidence adaptively, which is thus called adaptive Bayesian personalized ranking (ABPR). ABPR has the merits of uncertainty reduction on examination records and accurate pairwise preference learning on implicit feedbacks. Experimental results on two public data sets show that ABPR is able to leverage uncertain examination records effectively, and can achieve better recommendation performance than the state-of-the-art algorithm on various ranking-oriented evaluation metrics. In many application domains of recommender systems, explicit rating information is sparse or non-existent. The preferences of the current user have therefore to be approximated by interpreting his or her behavior, i.e., the implicit user feedback. In the literature, a number of algorithm proposals have been made that rely solely on such implicit feedback, among them Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR). In the BPR approach, pairwise comparisons between the items are made in the training phase and an item i is considered to be preferred over item j if the user interacted in some form with i but not with j. In real-world applications, however, implicit feedback is not necessarily limited to such binary decisions as there are, e.g., different types of user actions like item views, cart or purchase actions and there can exist several actions for an item over time. In this paper we show how BPR can be extended to deal with such more fine-granular, graded preference relations. An empirical analysis shows that this extension can help to measurably increase the predictive accuracy of BPR on realistic e-commerce datasets. Recently, many e-commerce websites have encouraged their users to rate shopping items and write review texts. This review information has been very useful for understanding user preferences and item properties, as well as enhancing the capability to make personalized recommendations of these websites. In this paper, we propose to model user preferences and item properties using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with dual local and global attention, motivated by the superiority of CNNs to extract complex features. By using aggregated review texts from a user and aggregated review text for an item, our model can learn the unique features (embedding) of each user and each item. These features are then used to predict ratings. We train these user and item networks jointly which enable the interaction between users and items in a similar way as matrix factorization. The local attention provides us insight on a user's preferences or an item's properties. The global attention helps CNNs focus on the semantic meaning of the whole review text. Thus, the combined local and global attentions enable an interpretable and better-learned representation of users and items. We validate the proposed models by testing on popular review datasets in Yelp and Amazon and compare the results with matrix factorization (MF), the hidden factor and topical (HFT) model, and the recently proposed convolutional matrix factorization (ConvMF+). Our proposed CNNs with dual attention model outperforms HFT and ConvMF+ in terms of mean square errors (MSE). In addition, we compare the user item embeddings learned from these models for classification and recommendation. These results also confirm the superior quality of user item embeddings learned from our model. Recently, neuron activations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) show promising performance in various visual tasks. However, due to the domain and task bias, using the features generated from the model pre-trained for image classification as image representations for instance retrieval is problematic. In this paper, we propose quartet-net learning to improve the discriminative power of CNN features for instance retrieval. The general idea is to map the features into a space where the image similarity can be better evaluated. Our network differs from the traditional Siamese-net in two ways. First, we adopt a double-margin contrastive loss with a dynamic margin tuning strategy to train the network which leads to more robust performance. Second, we introduce in the mimic learning regularization to improve the generalization ability of the network by preventing it from overfitting to the training data. Catering for the network learning, we collect a large-scale dataset, namely GeoPair, which consists of 68k matching image pairs and 63k non-matching pairs. Experiments on several standard instance retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.