Collaborative Recommender Systems Research Articles

Collaborative Recommender System Development with Ubiquitous Computing Capability for Risk Awareness

Collaborative Recommender System Development with Ubiquitous Computing Capability for Risk Awareness

Collaborative Filtering Recommender System for Online Learning Resources with Integrated Dynamic Time Weighting and Trust Value Calculation

Collaborative Filtering Recommender System for Online Learning Resources with Integrated Dynamic Time Weighting and Trust Value Calculation

Multi-source information contrastive learning collaborative augmented conversational recommender systems

AbstractConversational Recommender Systems (CRS) aim to provide high-quality items to users in fewer conversation rounds using natural language. Despite various attempts that have been made, there are still some problems: Previous CRS only learned item representations in a single knowledge graph and ignored item tags; information gaps exist in the same items from different knowledge graphs and information popularity both affect user preferences; system generated responses lack descriptiveness and diversity. To address these problems and fully utilize external knowledge, we propose a Multi-source Information Contrastive Learning Collaborative Augmented method ($$\textbf{MCCA}$$ MCCA ), which aims to mine the potential tag preferences of users in dialogues as well as enhance the accuracy of item representation and user preference modeling. Specifically, we utilize the obtained items and their tags to construct a new knowledge graph that incorporates movie tags. We design a Multi-source Item Fusion mechanism ($$\textbf{MIF}$$ MIF ) to bridge the information gaps between items from different knowledge graphs and then utilize unsupervised contrastive learning to enhance the items’ representation capability after MIF. Additionally, a Multi-Tag Fusion mechanism ($$\textbf{MTF}$$ MTF ) is designed to combine user-perceived information (i.e., tag popularity) and keywords obtained from reviews to co-enhance user preference representations through items and tags, and to incorporate fused item and tag features into the conversation module. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that MCCA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/lhy-cqut/MCCA.

Enhancing language acquisition through personalized learning: The role of collaborative filtering and recommender systems in TESOL

This paper explores the transformative potential of Collaborative Filtering (CF) and Recommender Systems (RS) in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). By leveraging data-driven insights from learner interactions, these technologies offer personalized learning experiences that significantly enhance language acquisition, engagement, and retention. Through empirical evidence and quantitative analyses, we demonstrate the positive impact of CF and RS on learners' proficiency, vocabulary acquisition, and communicative competence. The integration of CF and RS into TESOL not only facilitates adaptive learning pathways but also addresses practical implementation challenges, including privacy, ethical concerns, and technological barriers. This study underscores the efficacy of personalized learning recommendations in creating more engaging, efficient, and effective language learning environments.

Application of recommendation system based on fuzzy logic in music culture communication and music teaching management

Music has been utilized throughout history as a medium for cultural communication and artistic expression, embodying various nations’ and societies’ ideologies and experiences. Music culture communication is crucial for encouraging cultural diversity and understanding and developing social cohesion and community building among people. Music teaching management is the process of setting up, arranging, and executing music education programs in a manner that successfully teaches students the essential skills and information necessary for becoming proficient musicians. Users’ exact preferences for various areas of attraction cannot be determined, nor are users’ choices for traditional music recommendations sufficiently accurate. A recommender system estimates or anticipates people’s preferences and offers appropriate recommendations. First, the sparsity problem emerges when insufficient data is accessible for the recommendation, and the coverage is one of the key drawbacks of social labeling. Cold start issues might be difficult since new music learners might not have given sufficient details about their musical tastes. Hence, the Hybridized Fuzzy logic-based Content and Collaborative Music Recommendation (HFC2MR) system is proposed to create personalized music teaching plans that are effective and engaging for each student based on their music preferences and learning outcomes. Enhanced Fuzzy C-Means clustering is used in collaborative recommendations to group users based on their shared musical tastes and to provide each user with more individualized, accurate music recommendations based on other users’ listening habits and preferences in the same cluster. Subsequently, an assessment of the recommender system using parameters like accuracy, precision, f1-score, and recall ratio is shown with optimal cluster selection. The coverage ratio is used to compare experimental data based on skill capacity covered through the assessment of music teaching. RMSE metric is used to evaluate the accuracy of students’ performance based on music attributes related to teaching goals.

Blended Teaching Mode Model of College English Based on Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithm

The incorporation of collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms into blended teaching approaches for college English marks a big step forward in language education. This study investigates the theoretical underpinnings, practical ramifications, and pedagogical issues for adding collaborative filtering algorithms into blended learning environments. Collaborative filtering algorithms produce individualized learning resource recommendations based on user interactions and preferences, increasing student engagement and motivation. However, issues like as data privacy, algorithmic biases, and user approval must be addressed to ensure that collaborative filtering is implemented effectively in the classroom. This study explains the potential of collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms to improve language learning results in college English courses by doing a thorough literature review. It also provides ideas for educators and policymakers on how to handle the complexity of incorporating collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms into blended learning models. Finally, this paper adds to the promotion of novel pedagogical approaches and the improvement of language learning experiences among college students. As a result, the enhanced collaborative filtering recommendation system had a slightly greater recall rate and precision than the pre-optimized method.

A Personalized Collaborative Filtering Recommendation System Based on Bi-Graph Embedding and Causal Reasoning.

The integration of graph embedding technology and collaborative filtering algorithms has shown promise in enhancing the performance of recommendation systems. However, existing integrated recommendation algorithms often suffer from feature bias and lack effectiveness in personalized user recommendation. For instance, users' historical interactions with a certain class of items may inaccurately lead to recommendations of all items within that class, resulting in feature bias. Moreover, accommodating changes in user interests over time poses a significant challenge. This study introduces a novel recommendation model, RCKFM, which addresses these shortcomings by leveraging the CoFM model, TransR graph embedding model, backdoor tuning of causal inference, KL divergence, and the factorization machine model. RCKFM focuses on improving graph embedding technology, adjusting feature bias in embedding models, and achieving personalized recommendations. Specifically, it employs the TransR graph embedding model to handle various relationship types effectively, mitigates feature bias using causal inference techniques, and predicts changes in user interests through KL divergence, thereby enhancing the accuracy of personalized recommendations. Experimental evaluations conducted on publicly available datasets, including "MovieLens-1M" and "Douban dataset" from Kaggle, demonstrate the superior performance of the RCKFM model. The results indicate a significant improvement of between 3.17% and 6.81% in key indicators such as precision, recall, normalized discount cumulative gain, and hit rate in the top-10 recommendation tasks. These findings underscore the efficacy and potential impact of the proposed RCKFM model in advancing recommendation systems.

A review of challenges, algorithms and evaluation methods in news recommendation

News reading is an important social activity and to help readers quickly find news articles of their interest, news content providers and aggregators use recommender systems. Such systems are designed to address a variety of challenges. Inspiration for algorithmic design is taken from various domains which has resulted in the creation of an enormous body of literature. Also, different methods are used for evaluation of the recommendation algorithms. In this study, we review these developments and present three major components in news recommendation research. First, we list and categorise the challenges faced while designing news recommender systems. We especially list the different algorithmic designs used for generating personalised and non-personalised recommendations. We discuss the major neural network architectures that are being increasingly used for both collaborative and content-based recommender systems. Next, we list the two major evaluation methods and also list some popular datasets used in evaluation. Finally, we identify the emerging trends in news recommender research. We find that the issues related to fake news, trust and use of personal data for news recommendation are gaining wider attention, and deep learning methods are being increasingly used to address these issues.

Data-driven internal mobility: Similarity regularization gets the job done

This paper presents a novel approach to support career management by recommending job–employee matches within an organization through data-driven insights. We build a recommender system to propose matches. The presented approach extends upon a conventional collaborative filtering recommender system, which suggests matches based on the historic performance similarities of employees. To address the prevalent challenge of the cold start issue in internal placement, we incorporate personal employee data with a similarity-based regularization term. This regularization term finds latent representations that are closer to each other when employees share similar personal features. This approach is evaluated using three real-life datasets and demonstrates a highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art benchmark methods. Overall, we make three contributions to the field of HR analytics: (i) we present a comprehensive survey of job–employee recommender systems in the context of internal mobility, (ii) we implement a similarity regularization method, and (iii) we release a first-of-its-kind HR dataset on internal mobility. All code and public data used in this study are available on GitHub.

Time-Aware Similarity Integration for User-Based Collaborative Filtering

A time-aware collaborative filtering-based recommender system provides item recommendations for the current user by prioritizing recent items preferred by similar neighbors over past preferred items. The similarity measure critically affects the performance of the system, and this study focuses on measuring the similarity between users that changes over time. After dividing the users’ rating time into intervals and computing similarity for each time interval, the final similarity is generated as a weighted sum by assigning lower weights to past similarity values and higher weights to more recent similarity values. Additionally, to ensure continuity of similarity measurement, consecutive time intervals are set to overlap. As a result of experiments applying the proposed method to the existing similarity measures, significant performance improvement was achieved in terms of some of the major performance metrics. In particular, the degree of coverage improvement was the highest, and the performance improvement effect was higher when the overlap size between time intervals was large rather than when it was small.

A Collaborative Filtering-Based Recommender Systems approach for Multifarious applications

Recommender systems are crucial in today's IT landscape, enhancing user experiences in various industries. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a key approach, using historical interaction data to predict user preferences. This paper presents CF advancements, with a focus on latent factor models that represent users and items in a compact feature space. It also addresses sparsity issues with techniques like neighborhood-based approaches and content augmentation. Contextual CF, which incorporates temporal and contextual dynamics, is explored through methods like matrix factorization with side information and session-based recommendation. Evaluation metrics such as MAE and RMSE, along with novel ranking-based metrics, provide a comprehensive assessment of recommendation quality. In this paper we outline cutting-edge CF techniques, showcasing their mechanisms and applications and were able to achieve accurate recommendations of almost 90% using MAE and RMSE metrics. By integrating latent factor modeling, sparsity mitigation, contextual enrichment, and advanced evaluation, it paves the way for the next generation of personalized recommendation systems, tailored to meet evolving demands in modern information environments.

Methods of preference aggregation in group recommender systems

The rapid growth of data volumes has led to information overload, which impedes informed decision-making. To solve this problem, recommender systems have emerged that analyze user preferences and offer relevant products on their own. One type of recommender system is group recommender systems, which are designed to facilitate collaborative decision-making, increase user engagement, and promote diversity and inclusion. However, these systems face challenges such as accommodating diverse group preferences and maintaining transparency in recommendation processes. In this study, we propose a method for aggregating preferences in group recommendation systems to retain as much information as possible from group members and improve the accuracy of recommendations. The proposed method provides recommendations to groups of users by avoiding the aggregation process in the first steps of recommendation, which preserves information throughout the group recommendation process and delays the aggregation step to provide accurate and diverse recommendations. When the object of a collaborative filtering-based recommender system is not a single user but a group of users, the strategy for calculating similarity between individual users to find similarity should be adapted to avoid aggregating the preferences of group members in the first step. In the proposed model, the nearest neighbors of a group of users are searched, so the method of finding neighbors is adapted to compare individual users with the group profile. An experimental study has shown that the proposed method achieves a satisfactory balance between accuracy and diversity. This makes it well suited for providing recommendations to large groups in situations where accuracy is more or less important compared to diversity. These results support the assumption that retaining all information from group members without using aggregation techniques can improve the performance of group recommender systems, taking into account various features.

A parallel quantum eigensolver for quantum machine learning

Eigensolvers have a wide range of applications in machine learning. Quantum eigensolvers have been developed for achieving quantum speedup. Here, we propose a parallel quantum eigensolver (PQE) for solving a set of machine learning problems, which is based on quantum multi-resonant transitions that simultaneously trigger multiple energy transitions in the systems on demand. PQE has a polylogarithmic cost in problem size under certain circumstances and is hardware efficient, such that it is implementable in near-term quantum computers. As a verification, we utilize it to construct a collaborative filtering quantum recommendation system and implement an experiment of the movie recommendation tasks on a nuclear spin quantum processor. As a result, our recommendation system accurately suggests movies to the user that he/she might be interested in. We further demonstrate the applications of PQE in classification and image completion. In the future, our work will shed light on more applications in quantum machine learning.

Tail-STEAK: Improve Friend Recommendation for Tail Users via Self-Training Enhanced Knowledge Distillation

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly employed in collaborative friend recommendation systems. Nevertheless, recent studies reveal a notable performance gap, particularly for users with limited connections, commonly known as tail users, in contrast to their counterparts with abundant connections (head users). Uniformly treating head and tail users poses two challenges for tail user preference learning: (C1) Label Sparsity, as tail users typically possess limited labels; and (C2) Neighborhood Sparsity, where tail users exhibit sparse observable friendships, leading to distinct preference distributions and performance degradation compared to head users. In response to these challenges, we introduce Tail-STEAK, an innovative framework that combines self-training with enhanced knowledge distillation for tail user representation learning. To address(C1), we present Tail-STEAK-base, a two-stage self-training framework. In the first stage, only head users and their accurate connections are utilized for training, while pseudo links are generated for tail users in the second stage. To tackle (C2), we propose two data augmentation-based self-knowledge distillation pretext tasks. These tasks are seamlessly integrated into different stages of Tail-STEAK-base, culminating in the comprehensive Tail-STEAK framework. Extensive experiments, conducted on state-of-the-art GNN-based friend recommendation models, substantiate the efficacy of Tail-STEAK in significantly improving tail user performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/antman9914/Tail-STEAK.

Selection of clusters based on internal indices in multi-clustering collaborative filtering recommender system

The successful application of a multi-clusteringbased neighborhood approach to recommender systems has led to increased recommendation accuracy and the elimination of divergence related to differences in clustering methods traditionally used. The Multi-Clustering Collaborative Filtering algorithm was developed to achieve this, as described in the author’s previous papers. However, utilizing multiple clusters poses challenges regarding memory consumption and scalability. Not all partitionings are equally advantageous, making selecting clusters for the recommender system’s input crucial without compromising recommendation accuracy. This article presents a solution for selecting clustering schemes based on internal indices evaluation. This method can be employed for preparing input data in collaborative filtering recommender systems. The study’s results confirm the positive impact of scheme selection on the overall recommendation performance, as it typically improves after the selection process. Furthermore, a smaller number of clustering schemes used as input for the recommender system enhances scalability and reduces memory consumption. The findings are compared with baseline recommenders’ outcomes to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

An Improved Fusion-Based Semantic Similarity Measure for Effective Collaborative Filtering Recommendations

Semantic-enhanced recommendation systems are promising approaches to overcome the sparsity and cold-start problems, which are hard to handle using the conventional collaborative filtering (CF) approaches. Further research is needed to effectively integrate ontologies into collaborative filtering recommender systems. This paper proposes an ontology-based semantic similarity measure to evaluate similarities between items and eventually generate accurate recommendations. The proposed semantic similarity measure termed fusion-based semantic similarity takes into account the semantics of ontological instances (i.e. items) inferred from a specific domain ontology, which is determined by analyzing the hierarchical relationships among the instances, as well as the features of the instances and their relationships to other instances. The new measure comprehensively captures the semantic knowledge associated with instances by exploiting all possible shared semantics between instances in a given domain ontology. Furthermore, this paper proposes a new semantic-enhanced hybrid recommendation approach as a result of combining the new semantic similarity measure with the standard item-based CF to enhance the quality of generated recommendations. In order to assess the effectiveness of our semantic-enhanced hybrid collaborative filtering method, a series of experiments were conducted to compare the performance of the proposed approach against well-established benchmark techniques. The reported experimental results consistently emphasize its superiority, demonstrating enhanced predictive abilities and a notable improvement in the quality of recommendations. More specifically, the proposed approach achieved notable 6% reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in certain cases, outperforming other benchmark techniques. Additionally, this study highlights the potential of using semantic-based similarity to enhance the performance of recommendation systems. Such enhancements address challenges within collaborative filtering, potentially leading to advancements in recommendation system design and optimization.

Review of collaborative filtering recommendation systems

In the era of information overload, recommender systems develop rapidly. And because the needs of information consumers are full of diversity and the information data provided by information producers is too large, to enhance the efficiency and quality of recommendations, the research community has introduced numerous approaches to optimize recommendation systems. As collaborative filtering stands as a time-tested technique in recommendation systems, This paper facilitates a swift comprehension of recent advances in collaborative filtering. It does so by examining the techniques presented across the entire collaborative filtering recommendation systems research field in recent years, especially its development in the domain of deep learning, and have a solid understanding of the field of study.

Fine-grained Sentiment-enhanced Collaborative Filtering-based Hybrid Recommender System

Developing online educational platforms necessitates the incorporation of new intelligent procedures in order to improve long-term student experience. Presently, e-learning recommender systems rely on deep learning methods to recommend appropriate e-learning materials to the students based on their learner profiles. Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FSA) can be leveraged to enrich the recommender system. User-posted reviews and rating data are vital in accurately directing the student to the appropriate e-learning resources based on posted comments by comparable learners. In this work, a new e-learning recommendation system is proposed based on individualization and FSA. A hybrid framework is provided by integrating alternating least square (ALS) based collaborative filtering (CF) with FSA to generate an effective e-content recommendation named HCFSAR. ALS attempts to capture the learner’s latent factors based on their selections of interest to build the learner profile. Three FSA models based on attention mechanisms and bidirectional long short-term memory (bi-LSTM) are suggested and used to train twelve models in order to predict new ratings from learner-posted book reviews based on the extracted learner profile. HCFSAR used multiplication word embeddings for stronger corpus representation that were trained on a dataset generated for an educational context and showed a better accuracy of 93.39% for the best model entitled MHAM based ABHR-2 with multiplication (MHAAM), which performed better than other models. A tailored dataset that has been created by scraping reviews of different e-learning resources is leveraged to train different proposed models and validate against public datasets.

Design of a dynamic and robust recommender system based on item context, trust, rating matrix and rating time using social networks analysis

Collaborative filtering recommender systems type have been increasingly used in e-commerce sites both to facilitate users' decision-making and increase sales. On the one hand, the open and interactive nature of recommender systems makes them vulnerable to shilling attacks, and on the other hand, given that most recommender systems are used in dynamic environments, and this issue generates incremental data over time. One of the main obstacles of this type of recommender systems is the inability to model the dynamic behavior of users and the incremental flow of data, as well as the vulnerability to shilling attacks. Therefore, classic models do not have the necessary ability to provide suitable recommendations to the user and also to detect shilling attacks dynamically. The objective of this study was to address this gap by designing a dynamic and robust recommender system model against shilling attacks. This model was based on item context, trust, users' rating and users' rating time, and it benefits from the social networks analysis of users and items to suggest @N top items to the target user, and had a dynamic and increasing property over time and robust against shilling attacks. Finally, to assess the performance and robustness of the recommender system to shilling attacks, 4850 different tests have been performed without shilling attacks and under three average, random, and bandwagon attacks. To validate the proposed model, the results of the tests have been compared with similar methods such as TRACCF, TOTAR and T&TRS using the evaluation criteria of Precision, Recall, F1, MAE and RMSE.The results depicted that the proposed method, due to finding users and similar items in communities created by social networks, causes a reduction in the number of predicted items that are not liked by the user (FP) and the number of unpredicted items that are liked by the user (FN) and finally the F1 criterion (which is a combination of Precision and Recall criteria) performs better than the comparison methods. Also, this method is robust against the shilling attacks by detecting fake profiles and ignoring them in the recommendation process, and the evaluation criteria before and after shilling attacks show this.

Handling Massive Sparse Data in Recommendation Systems

Collaborative filtering-based recommendation systems have become significant in various domains due to their ability to provide personalised recommendations. In e-commerce, these systems analyse the browsing history and purchase patterns of users to recommend items. In the entertainment industry, collaborative filtering helps platforms like Netflix and Spotify recommend movies, shows and songs based on users’ past preferences and ratings. This technology also finds significance in online education, where it assists in suggesting relevant courses and learning materials based on a user’s interests and previous learning behaviour. Even though much research has been done in this domain, the problems of sparsity and scalability in collaborative filtering still exist. Data sparsity refers to too few preferences of users on items, and hence it would be difficult to understand users’ preferences. Recommendation systems must keep users engaged with fast responses, and hence there is a challenge in handling large data as these days it is growing quickly. Sparsity affects the recommendation accuracy, while scalability influences the complexity of processing the recommendations. The motivation behind the paper is to design an efficient algorithm to address the sparsity and scalability problems, which in turn provide a better user experience and increased user satisfaction. This paper proposes two separate, novel approaches that deal with both problems. In the first approach, an improved autoencoder is used to address sparsity, and later, its outcome is processed in a parallel and distributed manner using a MapReduce-based [Formula: see text]-means clustering algorithm with the Elbow method. Since the [Formula: see text]-means clustering technique uses a predetermined number of clusters, it may not improve accuracy. So, the elbow method identifies the optimal number of clusters for the [Formula: see text]-means algorithm. In the second approach, a MapReduce-based Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with Expectation-Maximization (EM) is proposed to handle large volumes of sparse data. Both the proposed algorithms are implemented using MovieLens 20M and Netflix movie recommendation datasets to generate movie recommendations and are compared with the other state-of-the-art approaches. For comparison, metrics like RMSE, MAE, precision, recall, and F-score are used. The outcomes demonstrate that the second proposed strategy outperformed state-of-the-art approaches.