Understanding users' interactions with highly subjective content---like artistic images---is challenging due to the complex semantics that guide our preferences. On the one hand one has to overcome standard' recommender systems challenges, such as dealing with large, sparse, and long-tailed datasets. On the other, several new challenges present themselves, such as the need to model content in terms of its visual appearance, or even social dynamics, such as a preference toward a particular artist that is independent of the art they create. In this paper we build large-scale recommender systems to model the dynamics of a vibrant digital art community, Behance, consisting of tens of millions of interactions (clicks and 'appreciates') of users toward digital art. Methodologically, our main contributions are to model (a) rich content, especially in terms of its visual appearance; (b) temporal dynamics, in terms of how users prefer 'visually consistent' content within and across sessions; and (c) social dynamics, in terms of how users exhibit preferences both towards certain art styles, as well as the artists themselves.
Modeling Temporal Dynamics. Apart from the visual domain, in the machine learning community there have also been earlier efforts that investigate temporally-evolving data with algorithms such as SVMs @cite_14 , decision trees @cite_3 , instance-based learning @cite_6 , etc. Similar to ours are Collaborative Filtering models that take into account temporal dynamics. In particular, early works are based on similarity-oriented Collaborative Filtering, where a time weighting scheme can be used to assign previously-rated items with decaying weights when computing similarities (e.g. @cite_12 ). In contrast, recent works are mostly based on the well-known Matrix Factorization technique @cite_9 . For instance, Koren @cite_17 showed state-of-the-art results on data using Matrix Factorization to model the underlying temporal dynamics. However, these works do not consider handling the complex semantics of visual and social signals.
@cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_12 @cite_17
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Most existing content-based filtering approaches including Rocchio, Language Models, SVM, Logistic Regression, Neural Networks, etc. learn user profiles independently without capturing the similarity among users. The Bayesian hierarchical models learn user profiles jointly and have the advantage of being able to borrow information from other users through a Bayesian prior. The standard Bayesian hierarchical model assumes all user profiles are generated from the same prior. However, considering the diversity of user interests, this assumption might not be optimal. Besides, most existing content-based filtering approaches implicitly assume that each user profile corresponds to exactly one user interest and fail to capture a user's multiple interests (information needs). In this paper, we present a flexible Bayesian hierarchical modeling approach to model both commonality and diversity among users as well as individual users' multiple interests. We propose two models each with different assumptions, and the proposed models are called Discriminative Factored Prior Models (DFPM). In our models, each user profile is modeled as a discriminative classifier with a factored model as its prior, and different factors contribute in different levels to each user profile. Compared with existing content-based filtering models, DFPM are interesting because they can 1) borrow discriminative criteria of other users while learning a particular user profile through the factored prior; 2) trade off well between diversity and commonality among users; and 3) handle the challenging classification situation where each class contains multiple concepts. The experimental results on a dataset collected from real users on digg.com show that our models significantly outperform the baseline models of L-2 regularized logistic regression and the standard Bayesian hierarchical model with logistic regression Collaborative filtering (CF) techniques recommend items to users based on their historical ratings. In real-world scenarios, user interests may drift over time since they are affected by moods, contexts, and pop culture trends. This leads to the fact that a user's historical ratings comprise many aspects of user interests spanning a long time period. However, at a certain time slice, one user's interest may only focus on one or a couple of aspects. Thus, CF techniques based on the entire historical ratings may recommend inappropriate items. In this paper, we consider modeling user-interest drift over time based on the assumption that each user has multiple counterparts over temporal domains and successive counterparts are closely related. We adopt the cross-domain CF framework to share the static group-level rating matrix across temporal domains, and let user-interest distribution over item groups drift slightly between successive temporal domains. The derived method is based on a Bayesian latent factor model which can be inferred using Gibbs sampling. Our experimental results show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art recommendation performance as well as explicitly track and visualize user-interest drift over time. We study the problem of classifying actions of human subjects using depth movies generated by Kinect or other depth sensors. Representing human body as dynamical skeletons, we study the evolution of their (skeletons’) shapes as trajectories on Kendall’s shape manifold. The action data is typically corrupted by large variability in execution rates within and across subjects and, thus, causing major problems in statistical analyses. To address that issue, we adopt a recently-developed framework of [1] , [2] to this problem domain. Here, the variable execution rates correspond to re-parameterizations of trajectories, and one uses a parameterization-invariant metric for aligning, comparing, averaging, and modeling trajectories. This is based on a combination of transported square-root vector fields (TSRVFs) of trajectories and the standard Euclidean norm, that allows computational efficiency. We develop a comprehensive suite of computational tools for this application domain: smoothing and denoising skeleton trajectories using median filtering, up- and down-sampling actions in time domain, simultaneous temporal-registration of multiple actions, and extracting invertible Euclidean representations of actions. Due to invertibility these Euclidean representations allow both discriminative and generative models for statistical analysis. For instance, they can be used in a SVM-based classification of original actions, as demonstrated here using MSR Action-3D, MSR Daily Activity and 3D Action Pairs datasets. Using only the skelet al information, we achieve state-of-the-art classification results on these datasets. Time series data mining has received much greater interest along with the increase in temporal data sets from different domains such as medicine, finance, multimedia, etc. Representations are important to reduce dimensionality and generate useful similarity measures. High-level representations such as Fourier transforms, wavelets, piecewise polynomial models, etc., were considered previously. Recently, autoregressive kernels were introduced to reflect the similarity of the time series. We introduce a novel approach to model the dependency structure in time series that generalizes the concept of autoregression to local autopatterns. Our approach generates a pattern-based representation along with a similarity measure called learned pattern similarity (LPS). A tree-based ensemble-learning strategy that is fast and insensitive to parameter settings is the basis for the approach. Then, a robust similarity measure based on the learned patterns is presented. This unsupervised approach to represent and measure the similarity between time series generally applies to a number of data mining tasks (e.g., clustering, anomaly detection, classification). Furthermore, an embedded learning of the representation avoids pre-defined features and an extraction step which is common in some feature-based approaches. The method generalizes in a straightforward manner to multivariate time series. The effectiveness of LPS is evaluated on time series classification problems from various domains. We compare LPS to eleven well-known similarity measures. Our experimental results show that LPS provides fast and competitive results on benchmark datasets from several domains. Furthermore, LPS provides a research direction and template approach that breaks from the linear dependency models to potentially foster other promising nonlinear approaches.