Restricted Boltzman Machines (RBMs) have been successfully used in recommender systems. However, as with most of other collaborative filtering techniques, it cannot solve cold start problems for there is no rating for a new item. In this paper, we first apply conditional RBM (CRBM) which could take extra information into account and show that CRBM could solve cold start problem very well, especially for rating prediction task. CRBM naturally combine the content and collaborative data under a single framework which could be fitted effectively. Experiments show that CRBM can be compared favourably with matrix factorization models, while hidden features learned from the former models are more easy to be interpreted.
Previous work @cite_13 uses a probabilistic topic model to solve the cold start problem in three step. Firstly, they map users into a latent space by features of their related items. Every user could be represented by some topics of features. Then a 'folding-in' algorithm is used to fold new items into a user-feature aspect model. Finally, the probability of a user given a new movie (could be seen as some similarity measure) was calculated in order to make recommendation.
@cite_13
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We propose fLDA, a novel matrix factorization method to predict ratings in recommender system applications where a "bag-of-words" representation for item meta-data is natural. Such scenarios are commonplace in web applications like content recommendation, ad targeting and web search where items are articles, ads and web pages respectively. Because of data sparseness, regularization is key to good predictive accuracy. Our method works by regularizing both user and item factors simultaneously through user features and the bag of words associated with each item. Specifically, each word in an item is associated with a discrete latent factor often referred to as the topic of the word; item topics are obtained by averaging topics across all words in an item. Then, user rating on an item is modeled as user's affinity to the item's topics where user affinity to topics (user factors) and topic assignments to words in items (item factors) are learned jointly in a supervised fashion. To avoid overfitting, user and item factors are regularized through Gaussian linear regression and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) priors respectively. We show our model is accurate, interpretable and handles both cold-start and warm-start scenarios seamlessly through a single model. The efficacy of our method is illustrated on benchmark datasets and a new dataset from Yahoo! Buzz where fLDA provides superior predictive accuracy in cold-start scenarios and is comparable to state-of-the-art methods in warm-start scenarios. As a by-product, fLDA also identifies interesting topics that explains user-item interactions. Our method also generalizes a recently proposed technique called supervised LDA (sLDA) to collaborative filtering applications. While sLDA estimates item topic vectors in a supervised fashion for a single regression, fLDA incorporates multiple regressions (one for each user) in estimating the item factors. Recommending new items to existing users has remained a challenging problem due to absence of user's past preferences for these items. The user personalized non-collaborative methods based on item features can be used to address this item cold-start problem. These methods rely on similarities between the target item and user's previous preferred items. While computing similarities based on item features, these methods overlook the interactions among the features of the items and consider them independently. Modeling interactions among features can be helpful as some features, when considered together, provide a stronger signal on the relevance of an item when compared to case where features are considered independently. To address this important issue, in this work we introduce the Feature-based factorized Bilinear Similarity Model (FBSM), which learns factorized bilinear similarity model for TOP-n recommendation of new items, given the information about items preferred by users in past as well as the features of these items. We carry out extensive empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets, and we find that the proposed FBSM approach improves upon traditional non-collaborative methods in terms of recommendation performance. Moreover, the proposed approach also learns insightful interactions among item features from data, which lead to deep understanding on how these interactions contribute to personalized recommendation. Recommender systems are widely used in online e-commerce applications to improve user engagement and then to increase revenue. A key challenge for recommender systems is providing high quality recommendation to users in cold-start" situations. We consider three types of cold-start problems: 1) recommendation on existing items for new users; 2) recommendation on new items for existing users; 3) recommendation on new items for new users. We propose predictive feature-based regression models that leverage all available information of users and items, such as user demographic information and item content features, to tackle cold-start problems. The resulting algorithms scale efficiently as a linear function of the number of observations. We verify the usefulness of our approach in three cold-start settings on the MovieLens and EachMovie datasets, by comparing with five alternatives including random, most popular, segmented most popular, and two variations of Vibes affinity algorithm widely used at Yahoo! for recommendation. Recent online services rely heavily on automatic personalization to recommend relevant content to a large number of users. This requires systems to scale promptly to accommodate the stream of new users visiting the online services for the first time. In this work, we propose a content-based recommendation system to address both the recommendation quality and the system scalability. We propose to use a rich feature set to represent users, according to their web browsing history and search queries. We use a Deep Learning approach to map users and items to a latent space where the similarity between users and their preferred items is maximized. We extend the model to jointly learn from features of items from different domains and user features by introducing a multi-view Deep Learning model. We show how to make this rich-feature based user representation scalable by reducing the dimension of the inputs and the amount of training data. The rich user feature representation allows the model to learn relevant user behavior patterns and give useful recommendations for users who do not have any interaction with the service, given that they have adequate search and browsing history. The combination of different domains into a single model for learning helps improve the recommendation quality across all the domains, as well as having a more compact and a semantically richer user latent feature vector. We experiment with our approach on three real-world recommendation systems acquired from different sources of Microsoft products: Windows Apps recommendation, News recommendation, and Movie TV recommendation. Results indicate that our approach is significantly better than the state-of-the-art algorithms (up to 49 enhancement on existing users and 115 enhancement on new users). In addition, experiments on a publicly open data set also indicate the superiority of our method in comparison with transitional generative topic models, for modeling cross-domain recommender systems. Scalability analysis show that our multi-view DNN model can easily scale to encompass millions of users and billions of item entries. Experimental results also confirm that combining features from all domains produces much better performance than building separate models for each domain. Content-based recommendation systems can provide recommendations for "cold-start" items for which little or no training data is available, but typically have lower accuracy than collaborative filtering systems. Conversely, collaborative filtering techniques often provide accurate recommendations, but fail on cold start items. Hybrid schemes attempt to combine these different kinds of information to yield better recommendations across the board. We describe unified Boltzmann machines, which are probabilistic models that combine collaborative and content information in a coherent manner. They encode collaborative and content information as features, and then learn weights that reflect how well each feature predicts user actions. In doing so, information of different types is automatically weighted, without the need for careful engineering of features or for post-hoc hybridization of distinct recommender systems. We present empirical results in the movie and shopping domains showing that unified Boltzmann machines can be used to combine content and collaborative information to yield results that are competitive with collaborative techniques in recommending items that have been seen before, and also effective at recommending cold-start items. Cold-start scenarios in recommender systems are situations in which no prior events, like ratings or clicks, are known for certain users or items. To compute predictions in such cases, additional information about users (user attributes, e.g. gender, age, geographical location, occupation) and items (item attributes, e.g. genres, product categories, keywords) must be used. We describe a method that maps such entity (e.g. user or item) attributes to the latent features of a matrix (or higher-dimensional) factorization model. With such mappings, the factors of a MF model trained by standard techniques can be applied to the new-user and the new-item problem, while retaining its advantages, in particular speed and predictive accuracy. We use the mapping concept to construct an attribute-aware matrix factorization model for item recommendation from implicit, positive-only feedback. Experiments on the new-item problem show that this approach provides good predictive accuracy, while the prediction time only grows by a constant factor. In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new, unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning, where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating matrix. We examine the cold-start recommendation task in an online retail setting for users who have not yet purchased (or interacted in a meaningful way with) any available items but who have granted access to limited side information, such as basic demographic data (gender, age, location) or social network information (Facebook friends or page likes). We formalize neighborhood-based methods for cold-start collaborative filtering in a generalized matrix algebra framework that does not require purchase data for target users when their side information is available. In real-data experiments with 30,000 users who purchased 80,000+ books and had 9,000,000+ Facebook friends and 6,000,000+ page likes, we show that using Facebook page likes for cold-start recommendation yields up to a 3-fold improvement in mean average precision (mAP) and up to 6-fold improvements in Precision@k and Recall@k compared to most-popular-item, demographic, and Facebook friend cold-start recommenders. These results demonstrate the substantial predictive power of social network content, and its significant utility in a challenging problem - recommendation for cold-start users. Recommender Systems based on Collaborative Filtering suggest to users items they might like, such as movies, songs, scientific papers, or jokes. Based on the ratings Based on the ratings provided by users about items, they first find users similar to the users receiving the recommendations and then suggest to her items appreciated in past by those like-minded users. However, given the ratable items are many and the ratings provided by each users only a tiny fraction, the step of finding similar users often fails. We propose to replace this step with the use of a trust metric, an algorithm able to propagate trust over the trust network in order to find users that can be trusted by the active user. Items appreciated by these trustworthy users can then be recommended to the active user. An empirical evaluation on a large dataset crawled from Epinions.com shows that Recommender Systems that make use of trust information are the most effective in term of accuracy while preserving a good coverage. This is especially evident on users who provided few ratings, so that trust is able to alleviate the cold start problem and other weaknesses that beset Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems. Recommender systems suggest to users items that they might like (e.g., news articles, songs, movies) and, in doing so, they help users deal with information overload and enjoy a personalized experience. One of the main problems of these systems is the item cold-start, i.e., when a new item is introduced in the system and no past information is available, then no effective recommendations can be produced. The item cold-start is a very common problem in practice: modern online platforms have hundreds of new items published every day. To address this problem, we propose to learn Local Collective Embeddings: a matrix factorization that exploits items' properties and past user preferences while enforcing the manifold structure exhibited by the collective embeddings. We present a learning algorithm based on multiplicative update rules that are efficient and easy to implement. The experimental results on two item cold-start use cases: news recommendation and email recipient recommendation, demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and show that it significantly outperforms six state-of-the-art methods for item cold-start. One of the most challenging recommendation tasks is recommending to a new, previously unseen user. This is known as the user cold start problem. Assuming certain features or attributes of users are known, one approach for handling new users is to initially model them based on their features. Motivated by an ad targeting application, this paper describes an extreme online recommendation setting where the cold start problem is perpetual. Every user is encountered by the system just once, receives a recommendation, and either consumes or ignores it, registering a binary reward. We introduce One-pass Factorization of Feature Sets, 'OFF-Set', a novel recommendation algorithm based on Latent Factor analysis, which models users by mapping their features to a latent space. OFF-Set is able to model non-linear interactions between pairs of features, and updates its model per each recommendation-reward observation in a pure online fashion. We evaluate OFF-Set against several state of the art baselines, and demonstrate its superiority on real ad-targeting data. A major challenge in collaborative filtering based recommender systems is how to provide recommendations when rating data is sparse or entirely missing for a subset of users or items, commonly known as the cold-start problem. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in developing new solutions that address the cold-start problem. These solutions are mainly based on the idea of exploiting other sources of information to compensate for the lack of rating data. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithmic framework based on matrix factorization that simultaneously exploits the similarity information among users and items to alleviate the cold-start problem. In contrast to existing methods, the proposed algorithm decouples the following two aspects of the cold-start problem: (a) the completion of a rating sub-matrix, which is generated by excluding cold-start users and items from the original rating matrix; and (b) the transduction of knowledge from existing ratings to cold-start items users using side information. This crucial difference significantly boosts the performance when appropriate side information is incorporated. We provide theoretical guarantees on the estimation error of the proposed two-stage algorithm based on the richness of similarity information in capturing the rating data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that addresses the cold-start problem with provable guarantees. We also conduct thorough experiments on synthetic and real datasets that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and highlights the usefulness of auxiliary information in dealing with both cold-start users and items. In this paper, we study a cold-start problem in recommendation systems where we have completely new users entered the systems. There is not any interaction or feedback of the new users with the systems previoustly, thus no ratings are available. Trivial approaches are to select ramdom items or the most popular ones to recommend to the new users. However, these methods perform poorly in many case. In this research, we provide a new look of this cold-start problem in recommendation systems. In fact, we cast this cold-start problem as a contextual-bandit problem. No additional information on new users and new items is needed. We consider all the past ratings of previous users as contextual information to be integrated into the recommendation framework. To solve this type of the cold-start problems, we propose a new efficient method which is based on the LinUCB algorithm for contextual-bandit problems. The experiments were conducted on three different publicly-available data sets, namely Movielens, Netflix and Yahoo!Music. The new proposed methods were also compared with other state-of-the-art techniques. Experiments showed that our new method significantly improves upon all these methods. The number of "hits" has been widely regarded as the lifeblood of many web systems, e.g., e-commerce systems, advertising systems and multimedia consumption systems. However, users would not hit an item if they cannot see it, or they are not interested in the item. Recommender system plays a critical role of discovering interested items from near-infinite inventory and exhibiting them to potential users. Yet, two issues are crippling the recommender systems. One is "how to handle new users", and the other is "how to surprise users". The former is well-known as cold-start recommendation, and the latter can be investigated as long-tail recommendation. This paper, for the first time, proposes a novel approach which can simultaneously handle both cold-start and long-tail recommendation in a unified objective. For the cold-start problem, we learn from side information, e.g., user attributes, user social relationships, etc. Then, we transfer the learned knowledge to new users. For the long-tail recommendation, we decompose the overall interested items into two parts: a low-rank part for short-head items and a sparse part for long-tail items. The two parts are independently revealed in the training stage, and transfered into the final recommendation for new users. Furthermore, we effectively formulate the two problems into a unified objective and present an iterative optimization algorithm. Experiments of recommendation on various real-world datasets, such as images, blogs, videos and musics, verify the superiority of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art work. Recommendation and review sites offer a wealth of information beyond ratings. For instance, on IMDb users leave reviews, commenting on different aspects of a movie (e.g. actors, plot, visual effects), and expressing their sentiments (positive or negative) on these aspects in their reviews. This suggests that uncovering aspects and sentiments will allow us to gain a better understanding of users, movies, and the process involved in generating ratings. The ability to answer questions such as "Does this user care more about the plot or about the special effects?" or "What is the quality of the movie in terms of acting?" helps us to understand why certain ratings are generated. This can be used to provide more meaningful recommendations. In this work we propose a probabilistic model based on collaborative filtering and topic modeling. It allows us to capture the interest distribution of users and the content distribution for movies; it provides a link between interest and relevance on a per-aspect basis and it allows us to differentiate between positive and negative sentiments on a per-aspect basis. Unlike prior work our approach is entirely unsupervised and does not require knowledge of the aspect specific ratings or genres for inference. We evaluate our model on a live copy crawled from IMDb. Our model offers superior performance by joint modeling. Moreover, we are able to address the cold start problem -- by utilizing the information inherent in reviews our model demonstrates improvement for new users and movies. The growth of Internet commerce has stimulated the use of collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms as recommender systems. Such systems leverage knowledge about the known preferences of multiple users to recommend items of interest to other users. CF methods have been harnessed to make recommendations about such items as web pages, movies, books, and toys. Researchers have proposed and evaluated many approaches for generating recommendations. We describe and evaluate a new method called personality diagnosis (PD). Given a user's preferences for some items, we compute the probability that he or she is of the same "personality type" as other users, and, in turn, the probability that he or she will like new items. PD retains some of the advantages of traditional similarity-weighting techniques in that all data is brought to bear on each prediction and new data can be added easily and incrementally. Additionally, PD has a meaningful probabilistic interpretation, which may be leveraged to justify, explain, and augment results. We report empirical results on the EachMovie database of movie ratings, and on user profile data collected from the CiteSeer digital library of Computer Science research papers. The probabilistic framework naturally supports a variety of descriptive measurements--in particular, we consider the applicability of a value of information (VOI) computation. Recommender systems are very useful due to the huge volume of information available on the Web. It helps users alleviate the information overload problem by recommending users with the personalized information, products or services (called items). Collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation algorithms have been widely deployed in e-commerce web sites. However, they both suffer from the scalability problem. In addition, there are few suitable similarity measures for the content-based recommendation methods to compute the similarity between items. In this paper, we propose a hybrid recommendation algorithm by combing the content-based and collaborative filtering techniques as well as incorporating the coupled similarity. Our method firstly partitions items into several item groups by using a coupled version of k-modes clustering algorithm, where the similarity between items is measured by the Coupled Object Similarity considering coupling between items. The collaborative filtering technique is then used to produce the recommendations for active users. Experimental results show that our proposed hybrid recommendation algorithm effectively solves the scalability issue of recommender systems and provides a comparable recommendation quality when lacking most of the item features. Most existing recommender systems focus on modeling the ratings while ignoring the abundant information embedded in the review text. In this paper, we propose a unified model that combines content-based filtering with collaborative filtering, harnessing the information of both ratings and reviews. We apply topic modeling techniques on the review text and align the topics with rating dimensions to improve prediction accuracy. With the information embedded in the review text, we can alleviate the cold-start problem. Furthermore, our model is able to learn latent topics that are interpretable. With these interpretable topics, we can explore the prior knowledge on items or users and recommend completely "cold"' items. Empirical study on 27 classes of real-life datasets show that our proposed model lead to significant improvement compared with strong baseline methods, especially for datasets which are extremely sparse where rating-only methods cannot make accurate predictions. Sequential recommendation is a fundamental task for network applications, and it usually suffers from the item cold start problem due to the insufficiency of user feedbacks. There are currently three kinds of popular approaches which are respectively based on matrix factorization (MF) of collaborative filtering, Markov chain (MC), and recurrent neural network (RNN). Although widely used, they have some limitations. MF based methods could not capture dynamic user's interest. The strong Markov assumption greatly limits the performance of MC based methods. RNN based methods are still in the early stage of incorporating additional information. Based on these basic models, many methods with additional information only validate incorporating one modality in a separate way. In this work, to make the sequential recommendation and deal with the item cold start problem, we propose a Multi-View Recurrent Neural Network (MV-RNN ) model. Given the latent feature, MV-RNN can alleviate the item cold start problem by incorporating visual and textual information. First, At the input of MV-RNN, three different combinations of multi-view features are studied, like concatenation, fusion by addition and fusion by reconstructing the original multi-modal data. MV-RNN applies the recurrent structure to dynamically capture the user's interest. Second, we design a separate structure and a united structure on the hidden state of MV-RNN to explore a more effective way to handle multi-view features. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MV-RNN can effectively generate the personalized ranking list, tackle the missing modalities problem and significantly alleviate the item cold start problem. Probabilistic topic models have been widely used for sentiment analysis. However, most of existing topic methods only model the sentiment text, but do not consider the user, who expresses the sentiment, and the item, which the sentiment is expressed on. Since different users may use different sentiment expressions for different items, we argue that it is better to incorporate the user and item information into the topic model for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a new Supervised User-Item based Topic model, called SUIT model, for sentiment analysis. It can simultaneously utilize the textual topic and latent user-item factors. Our proposed method uses the tensor outer product of text topic proportion vector, user latent factor and item latent factor to model the sentiment label generalization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets: review dataset and microblog dataset. The results demonstrate the advantages of our model. It shows significant improvement compared with supervised topic models and collaborative filtering methods.