This work focuses on top-k recommendation in domains where underlying data distribution shifts overtime. We propose to learn a time-dependent bias for each item over whatever existing recommendation engine. Such a bias learning process alleviates data sparsity in constructing the engine, and at the same time captures recent trend shift observed in data. We present an alternating optimization framework to resolve the bias learning problem, and develop methods to handle a variety of commonly used recommendation evaluation criteria, as well as large number of items and users in practice. The proposed algorithm is examined, both offline and online, using real world data sets collected from the largest retailer worldwide. Empirical results demonstrate that the bias learning can almost always boost recommendation performance. We encourage other practitioners to adopt it as a standard component in recommender systems where temporal dynamics is a norm.
Another related domain is learning to rank @cite_15 , which is initially motivated for the problem of information retrieval given queries. Making recommendations by learning to rank has attracted lots of attentions recently @cite_22 @cite_20 @cite_19 . EigenRank @cite_16 extends memory-based (or similarity-based) methods by considering the ranking (rather than rating) of items in computing user similarities. Matrix factorization has been extended to optimize for ranking-oriented loss as well. But most ranking-related metrics are non-smooth or non-convex. Hence, majority of the methods either approximate the loss via a smooth function or find a smooth lower upper bound for the loss function. For instance, CofiRank @cite_14 extends matrix factorization to optimize ranking measures like NDCG instead of rating measures. Because NDCG is non-convex, the authors propose a couple of steps to find a a convex upper-bound for the non-convex problem and adopt bundle method for optimization. CLiMF @cite_3 instead optimizes a lower bound of smooth reciprocal rank. Our proposed method differs because we explicitly optimizes for the exact ranking measure. This is viable because we are learning only biases, rather than latent factors, with the ranking loss.
@cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_3 @cite_19 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_20
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We study consistency properties of surrogate loss functions for general multiclass learning problems, defined by a general multiclass loss matrix. We extend the notion of classification calibration, which has been studied for binary and multiclass 0-1 classification problems (and for certain other specific learning problems), to the general multiclass setting, and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a surrogate loss to be calibrated with respect to a loss matrix in this setting. We then introduce the notion of convex calibration dimension of a multiclass loss matrix, which measures the smallest 'size' of a prediction space in which it is possible to design a convex surrogate that is calibrated with respect to the loss matrix. We derive both upper and lower bounds on this quantity, and use these results to analyze various loss matrices. In particular, we apply our framework to study various subset ranking losses, and use the convex calibration dimension as a tool to show both the existence and non-existence of various types of convex calibrated surrogates for these losses. Our results strengthen recent results of (2010) and (2012) on the non-existence of certain types of convex calibrated surrogates in subset ranking. We anticipate the convex calibration dimension may prove to be a useful tool in the study and design of surrogate losses for general multiclass learning problems. Learning to rank has become an important research topic in machine learning. While most learning-to-rank methods learn the ranking functions by minimizing loss functions, it is the ranking measures (such as NDCG and MAP) that are used to evaluate the performance of the learned ranking functions. In this work, we reveal the relationship between ranking measures and loss functions in learning-to-rank methods, such as Ranking SVM, RankBoost, RankNet, and ListMLE. We show that the loss functions of these methods are upper bounds of the measure-based ranking errors. As a result, the minimization of these loss functions will lead to the maximization of the ranking measures. The key to obtaining this result is to model ranking as a sequence of classification tasks, and define a so-called essential loss for ranking as the weighted sum of the classification errors of individual tasks in the sequence. We have proved that the essential loss is both an upper bound of the measure-based ranking errors, and a lower bound of the loss functions in the aforementioned methods. Our proof technique also suggests a way to modify existing loss functions to make them tighter bounds of the measure-based ranking errors. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the modifications can lead to better ranking performances, demonstrating the correctness of our theoretical analysis. We address the problem of learning large complex ranking functions. Most IR applications use evaluation metrics that depend only upon the ranks of documents. However, most ranking functions generate document scores, which are sorted to produce a ranking. Hence IR metrics are innately non-smooth with respect to the scores, due to the sort. Unfortunately, many machine learning algorithms require the gradient of a training objective in order to perform the optimization of the model parameters,and because IR metrics are non-smooth,we need to find a smooth proxy objective that can be used for training. We present a new family of training objectives that are derived from the rank distributions of documents, induced by smoothed scores. We call this approach SoftRank. We focus on a smoothed approximation to Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), called SoftNDCG and we compare it with three other training objectives in the recent literature. We present two main results. First, SoftRank yields a very good way of optimizing NDCG. Second, we show that it is possible to achieve state of the art test set NDCG results by optimizing a soft NDCG objective on the training set with a different discount function Hashing method becomes popular for large scale similarity search due to its storage and computational efficiency. Many machine learning techniques, ranging from unsupervised to supervised, have been proposed to design compact hashing codes. Most of the existing hashing methods generate binary codes to efficiently find similar data examples to a query. However, the ranking accuracy among the retrieved data examples is not modeled. But in many real world applications, ranking measure is important for evaluating the quality of hashing codes. In this paper, we propose a novel Ranking Preserving Hashing (RPH) approach that directly optimizes a popular ranking measure, Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), to obtain effective hashing codes with high ranking accuracy. The main difficulty in the direct optimization of NDCG measure is that it depends on the ranking order of data examples, which forms a non-convex nonsmooth optimization problem. We address this challenge by optimizing the expectation of NDCG measure calculated based on a linear hashing function. A gradient descent method is designed to achieve the goal. An extensive set of experiments on two large scale datasets demonstrate the superior ranking performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art hashing methods. One of the central issues in learning to rank for information retrieval is to develop algorithms that construct ranking models by directly optimizing evaluation measures used in information retrieval such as Mean Average Precision (MAP) and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). Several such algorithms including SVMmap and AdaRank have been proposed and their effectiveness has been verified. However, the relationships between the algorithms are not clear, and furthermore no comparisons have been conducted between them. In this paper, we conduct a study on the approach of directly optimizing evaluation measures in learning to rank for Information Retrieval (IR). We focus on the methods that minimize loss functions upper bounding the basic loss function defined on the IR measures. We first provide a general framework for the study and analyze the existing algorithms of SVMmap and AdaRank within the framework. The framework is based on upper bound analysis and two types of upper bounds are discussed. Moreover, we show that we can derive new algorithms on the basis of this analysis and create one example algorithm called PermuRank. We have also conducted comparisons between SVMmap, AdaRank, PermuRank, and conventional methods of Ranking SVM and RankBoost, using benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that the methods based on direct optimization of evaluation measures can always outperform conventional methods of Ranking SVM and RankBoost. However, no significant difference exists among the performances of the direct optimization methods themselves. Purpose  The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the widely used Times Cited criterion for analysing citation networks. The approach involves taking account of the natures of the papers that cite a given paper, so as to differentiate between papers that attract the same number of citations.Design methodology approach  ArticleRank is an algorithm that has been derived from Google's PageRank algorithm to measure the influence of journal articles. ArticleRank is applied to two datasets  a citation network based on an early paper on webometrics, and a selfcitation network based on the 19 most cited papers in the Journal of Documentation  using citation data taken from the Web of Knowledge database.Findings  ArticleRank values provide a different ranking of a set of papers from that provided by the corresponding Times Cited values, and overcomes the inability of the latter to differentiate between papers with the same numbers of citations. The difference in rankings between Times Cited ... In this paper we tackle the problem of recommendation in the scenarios with binary relevance data, when only a few (k) items are recommended to individual users. Past work on Collaborative Filtering (CF) has either not addressed the ranking problem for binary relevance datasets, or not specifically focused on improving top-k recommendations. To solve the problem we propose a new CF approach, Collaborative Less-is-More Filtering (CLiMF). In CLiMF the model parameters are learned by directly maximizing the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), which is a well-known information retrieval metric for measuring the performance of top-k recommendations. We achieve linear computational complexity by introducing a lower bound of the smoothed reciprocal rank metric. Experiments on two social network datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and the scalability of CLiMF, and show that CLiMF significantly outperforms a naive baseline and two state-of-the-art CF methods.