Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Recommender systems try to predict which items a user will prefer. Traditional models for recommendation only take into account the user-item interaction, usually expressed by explicit ratings. However, in these days, web services continuously generate auxiliary data from users and items that can be incorporated into the recommendation model to improve recommendations. In this work, we propose an incremental Matrix Co-factorization model with implicit user feedback, considering a real-world data-stream scenario. This model can be seen as an extension of the conventional Matrix Factorization that includes additional dimensions to be decomposed in the common latent factor space. We test our proposal against a baseline algorithm that relies exclusively on interaction data, using prequential evaluation. Our experimental results show a significant improvement in the accuracy of recommendations, after incorporating an additional dimension in three music domain datasets. © 2018 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.

Abstract

Abstract
Ensemble methods have been successfully used in the past to improve recommender systems; however, they have never been studied with incremental recommendation algorithms. Many online recommender systems deal with continuous, potentially fast, and unbounded flows of databig data streamsand often need to be responsive to fresh user feedback, adjusting recommendations accordingly. This is clear in tasks such as social network feeds, news recommender systems, automatic playlist completion, and other similar applications. Batch ensemble approaches are not suitable to perform continuous learning, given the complexity of retraining new models on demand. In this paper, we adapt a general purpose online bagging algorithm for top-N recommendation tasks and propose two novel online bagging methods specifically tailored for recommender systems. We evaluate the three approaches, using an incremental matrix factorization algorithm for top-N recommendation with positive-only user feedback data as the base model. Our results show that online bagging is able to improve accuracy up to 55% over the baseline, with manageable computational overhead.

Abstract
Exceptional preferences mining (EPM) is a crossover between two subfields of data mining: local pattern mining and preference learning. EPM can be seen as a local pattern mining task that finds subsets of observations where some preference relations between labels significantly deviate from the norm. It is a variant of subgroup discovery, with rankings of labels as the target concept. We employ several quality measures that highlight subgroups featuring exceptional preferences, where the focus of what constitutes exceptional' varies with the quality measure: two measures look for exceptional overall ranking behavior, one measure indicates whether a particular label stands out from the rest, and a fourth measure highlights subgroups with unusual pairwise label ranking behavior. We explore a few datasets and compare with existing techniques. The results confirm that the new task EPM can deliver interesting knowledge.