Online Learning of Parameters for Modeling User Preference Based on Bayesian Network

Abstract

By analyzing users’ behavior data for personalized services, most state-of-the-art methods for user preference modeling are often based on batch-mode machine learning algorithms, where all rating data are assumed to be available throughout the training process. However, data in the real world often arrives sequentially and user preference may change dynamically. The real-time characteristics of rating data make the algorithms for preference modeling challenging to suit real-world online applications. By the user preference model (UPM) based on Bayesian network with a latent variable (BNLV), uncertain relationships among relevant attributes of users, objects and ratings could be represented, in which user preference is represented by the latent variable. In this paper, we propose an online approach for parameter learning of UPM. Specifically, we first extend the classic Voting EM algorithm by using Bayesian estimation in terms of the situation with latent variables. Consequently, we propose the algorithm for learning parameters of UPM from few and sequentially-changing rating data to reflect the gradually changing preferences. Finally, we test the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm by conducting experiments on various datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in various measurements.