Sparsity Issue Research Articles

A network and visual quality aware N-screen content recommender system using joint matrix factorization.

We propose a network and visual quality aware N-Screen content recommender system. N-Screen provides more ways than ever before to access multimedia content through multiple devices and heterogeneous access networks. The heterogeneity of devices and access networks present new questions of QoS (quality of service) in the realm of user experience with content. We propose, a recommender system that ensures a better visual quality on user's N-screen devices and the efficient utilization of available access network bandwidth with user preferences. The proposed system estimates the available bandwidth and visual quality on users N-Screen devices and integrates it with users preferences and contents genre information to personalize his N-Screen content. The objective is to recommend content that the user's N-Screen device and access network are capable of displaying and streaming with the user preferences that have not been supported in existing systems. Furthermore, we suggest a joint matrix factorization approach to jointly factorize the users rating matrix with the users N-Screen device similarity and program genres similarity. Finally, the experimental results show that we also enhance the prediction and recommendation accuracy, sparsity, and cold start issues.

N-screen aware multicriteria hybrid recommender system using weight based subspace clustering.

This paper presents a recommender system for N-screen services in which users have multiple devices with different capabilities. In N-screen services, a user can use various devices in different locations and time and can change a device while the service is running. N-screen aware recommendation seeks to improve the user experience with recommended content by considering the user N-screen device attributes such as screen resolution, media codec, remaining battery time, and access network and the user temporal usage pattern information that are not considered in existing recommender systems. For N-screen aware recommendation support, this work introduces a user device profile collaboration agent, manager, and N-screen control server to acquire and manage the user N-screen devices profile. Furthermore, a multicriteria hybrid framework is suggested that incorporates the N-screen devices information with user preferences and demographics. In addition, we propose an individual feature and subspace weight based clustering (IFSWC) to assign different weights to each subspace and each feature within a subspace in the hybrid framework. The proposed system improves the accuracy, precision, scalability, sparsity, and cold start issues. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and prove the aforementioned statements.

Identification of sparse FIR systems using a general quantisation scheme

This paper presents an identification scheme for sparse FIR systems with quantised data. We consider a general quantisation scheme, which includes the commonly deployed static quantiser as a special case. To tackle the sparsity issue, we utilise a Bayesian approach, where an ℓ1 a priori distribution for the parameters is used as a mechanism to promote sparsity. The general framework used to solve the problem is maximum likelihood (ML). The ML problem is solved by using a generalised expectation maximisation algorithm.

Lazy Collaborative Filtering for Data Sets With Missing Values

As one of the biggest challenges in research on recommender systems, the data sparsity issue is mainly caused by the fact that users tend to rate a small proportion of items from the huge number of available items. This issue becomes even more problematic for the neighborhood-based collaborative filtering (CF) methods, as there are even lower numbers of ratings available in the neighborhood of the query item. In this paper, we aim to address the data sparsity issue in the context of neighborhood-based CF. For a given query (user, item), a set of key ratings is first identified by taking the historical information of both the user and the item into account. Then, an auto-adaptive imputation (AutAI) method is proposed to impute the missing values in the set of key ratings. We present a theoretical analysis to show that the proposed imputation method effectively improves the performance of the conventional neighborhood-based CF methods. The experimental results show that our new method of CF with AutAI outperforms six existing recommendation methods in terms of accuracy.

Autoregressive models for gene regulatory network inference: Sparsity, stability and causality issues

Reconstructing gene regulatory networks from high-throughput measurements represents a key problem in functional genomics. It also represents a canonical learning problem and thus has attracted a lot of attention in both the informatics and the statistical learning literature. Numerous approaches have been proposed, ranging from simple clustering to rather involved dynamic Bayesian network modeling, as well as hybrid ones that combine a number of modeling steps, such as employing ordinary differential equations coupled with genome annotation. These approaches are tailored to the type of data being employed. Available data sources include static steady state data and time course data obtained either for wild type phenotypes or from perturbation experiments.This review focuses on the class of autoregressive models using time course data for inferring gene regulatory networks. The central themes of sparsity, stability and causality are discussed as well as the ability to integrate prior knowledge for successful use of these models for the learning task at hand.

Minimally-supervised learning of domain-specific causal relations using an open-domain corpus as knowledge base

We propose a novel framework for overcoming the challenges in extracting causal relations from domain-specific texts. Our technique is minimally-supervised, alleviating the need for manually-annotated, expensive training data. As our main contribution, we show that open-domain corpora can be exploited as knowledge bases to overcome data sparsity issues posed by domain-specific relation extraction, and that they enable substantial performance gains. We also address longstanding challenges of extant minimally-supervised approaches. To suppress the negative impact of semantic drift, we propose a technique based on the Latent Relational Hypothesis. In addition, our approach discovers both explicit (e.g. “to cause”) and implicit (e.g. “to destroy”) causal patterns/relations. Unlike existing minimally-supervised techniques, we adopt a principled seed selection strategy, which enables us to discover a more diverse set of causal patterns/relations. Our experiments reveal that our approach outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline in discovering causal relations from a real-life, domain-specific corpus.

Trust-based Top-k Item Recommendation in Social Networks

Collaborative filtering based methods have a low performance in the context of social recommendation due to the data sparsity issue and not considering the social network information that can be exploited to improve the performance. Trust-based methods attempt to reduce the data sparsity by utilizing the social network information. However, most of these methods are based on the explicit trust statements expressed by users, which are not available in the social networks such as Sina Weibo. In this paper, we present a trust metric to quantitatively measure the recommendation trust between pairs of users by aggregating the implicit trust and trust propagation values. We propose a trust-based latent factor model, which incorporates the pairwise recommendation trust values into the probabilistic model for top-k item recommendation. The experiments on Sina Weibo demonstrate that our method outperforms the collaborative filtering based methods and trust-based methods.

Performance Improvement of a Movie Recommendation System based on Personal Propensity and Secure Collaborative Filtering

There are many recommendation systems available to provide users with personalized services. Among them, the most frequently used in electronic commerce is 'collaborative filtering', which is a technique that provides a process of filtering customer information for the preparation of profiles and making recommendations of products that are expected to be preferred by other users, based on such information profiles. Collaborative filtering systems, however, have in their nature both technical issues such as sparsity, scalability, and transparency, as well as security issues in the collection of the information that becomes the basis for preparation of the profiles. In this paper, we suggest a movie recommendation system, based on the selection of optimal personal propensity variables and the utilization of a secure collaborating filtering system, in order to provide a solution to such sparsity and scalability issues. At the same time, we adopt 'push attack' principles to deal with the security vulnerability of collaborative filtering systems. Furthermore, we assess the system's applicability by using the open database MovieLens, and present a personal propensity framework for improvement in the performance of recommender systems. We successfully come up with a movie recommendation system through the selection of optimal personalization factors and the embodiment of a safe collaborative filtering system.

A learning method for Top-N recommendations with incomplete data

In this paper, we tackle the incompleteness of user rating history in the context of collaborative filtering for Top-N recommendations. Previous research ignore a fact that two rating patterns exist in the user × item rating matrix and influence each other. More importantly, their interactive influence characterizes the development of each other, which can consequently be exploited to improve the modelling of rating patterns, especially when the user × item rating matrix is highly incomplete due to the well-known data sparsity issue. This paper proposes a Rating Pattern Subspace to iteratively re-optimize the missing values in each user’s rating history by modelling both the global and the personal rating patterns simultaneously. The basic idea is to project the user × item rating matrix on a low-rank subspace to capture the global rating patterns. Then, the projection of each individual user on the subspace is further optimized according to his/her own rating history and the captured global rating patterns. Finally, the optimized user projections are used to improve the modelling of the global rating patterns. Based on this subspace, we propose a RapSVD-L algorithm for Top-N recommendations. In the experiments, the performance of the proposed method is compared with the state-of-the-art Top-N recommendation methods on two real datasets under various data sparsity levels. The experimental results show that RapSVD-L outperforms the compared algorithms not only on the all items recommendations but also on the long tail item recommendations in terms of accuracy.

Evaluating the No Cold Calling Zones in Peterborough, England: Application of a Novel Statistical Method for Evaluating Neighbourhood Policing Policies

Some police forces in the UK institute ‘No Cold Calling’ (NCC) zones to reduce cold callings (unsolicited visits to sell products or services), which are often associated with rogue trading and distraction burglary. This paper evaluates the NCC-targeted areas chosen in 2005–06 in Peterborough and reports whether they experienced a measurable impact on their burglary rates in the period up to 2008. Time-series data for burglary at the census output area level are analysed using a Bayesian hierarchical modelling approach to address issues of data sparsity and lack of randomised allocation of areas to treatment groups that are often encountered in small-area quantitative policy evaluation. To ensure internal validity, we employ the interrupted time-series quasi-experimental design embedded within a matched case-control framework. Results reveal a positive impact of NCC zones on reducing burglary rates in the targeted areas compared with the control areas.

A comparison of clustering-based privacy-preserving collaborative filtering schemes

Privacy-preserving collaborative filtering (PPCF) methods designate extremely beneficial filtering skills without deeply jeopardizing privacy. However, they mostly suffer from scalability, sparsity, and accuracy problems. First, applying privacy measures introduces additional costs making scalability worse. Second, due to randomness for preserving privacy, quality of predictions diminishes. Third, with increasing number of products, sparsity becomes an issue for both CF and PPCF schemes.In this study, we first propose a content-based profiling (CBP) of users to overcome sparsity issues while performing clustering because the very sparse nature of rating profiles sometimes do not allow strong discrimination. To cope with scalability and accuracy problems of PPCF schemes, we then show how to apply k-means clustering (KMC), fuzzy c-means method (FCM), and self-organizing map (SOM) clustering to CF schemes while preserving users’ confidentiality. After presenting an evaluation of clustering-based methods in terms of privacy and supplementary costs, we carry out real data-based experiments to compare the clustering algorithms within and against traditional CF and PPCF approaches in terms of accuracy. Our empirical outcomes demonstrate that FCM achieves the best low cost performance compared to other methods due to its approximation-based model. The results also show that our privacy-preserving methods are able to offer precise predictions.

Term extraction from sparse, ungrammatical domain-specific documents

Existing term extraction systems have predominantly targeted large and well-written document collections, which provide reliable statistical and linguistic evidence to support term extraction. In this article, we address the term extraction challenges posed by sparse, ungrammatical texts with domain-specific contents, such as customer complaint emails and engineers’ repair notes. To this aim, we present ExtTerm, a novel term extraction system. Specifically, as our core innovations, we accurately detect rare (low frequency) terms, overcoming the issue of data sparsity. These rare terms may denote critical events, but they are often missed by extant TE systems. ExtTerm also precisely detects multi-word terms of arbitrarily lengths, e.g. with more than 2 words. This is achieved by exploiting fundamental theoretical notions underlying term formation, and by developing a technique to compute the collocation strength between any number of words. Thus, we address the limitation of existing TE systems, which are primarily designed to identify terms with 2 words. Furthermore, we show that open-domain (general) resources, such as Wikipedia, can be exploited to support domain-specific term extraction. Thus, they can be used to compensate for the unavailability of domain-specific knowledge resources. Our experimental evaluations reveal that ExtTerm outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline in extracting terms from a domain-specific, sparse and ungrammatical real-life text collection.

Computational Framework for Analysis of Prey–Prey Associations in Interaction Proteomics Identifies Novel Human Protein–Protein Interactions and Networks

Large-scale protein-protein interaction data sets have been generated for several species including yeast and human and have enabled the identification, quantification, and prediction of cellular molecular networks. Affinity purification-mass spectrometry (AP-MS) is the preeminent methodology for large-scale analysis of protein complexes, performed by immunopurifying a specific "bait" protein and its associated "prey" proteins. The analysis and interpretation of AP-MS data sets is, however, not straightforward. In addition, although yeast AP-MS data sets are relatively comprehensive, current human AP-MS data sets only sparsely cover the human interactome. Here we develop a framework for analysis of AP-MS data sets that addresses the issues of noise, missing data, and sparsity of coverage in the context of a current, real world human AP-MS data set. Our goal is to extend and increase the density of the known human interactome by integrating bait-prey and cocomplexed preys (prey-prey associations) into networks. Our framework incorporates a score for each identified protein, as well as elements of signal processing to improve the confidence of identified protein-protein interactions. We identify many protein networks enriched in known biological processes and functions. In addition, we show that integrated bait-prey and prey-prey interactions can be used to refine network topology and extend known protein networks.

Challenging the long tail recommendation

The success of "infinite-inventory" retailers such as Amazon.com and Netflix has been largely attributed to a "long tail" phenomenon. Although the majority of their inventory is not in high demand, these niche products, unavailable at limited-inventory competitors, generate a significant fraction of total revenue in aggregate. In addition, tail product availability can boost head sales by offering consumers the convenience of "one-stop shopping" for both their mainstream and niche tastes. However, most of existing recommender systems, especially collaborative filter based methods, can not recommend tail products due to the data sparsity issue. It has been widely acknowledged that to recommend popular products is easier yet more trivial while to recommend long tail products adds more novelty yet it is also a more challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel suite of graph-based algorithms for the long tail recommendation. We first represent user-item information with undirected edge-weighted graph and investigate the theoretical foundation of applying Hitting Time algorithm for long tail item recommendation. To improve recommendation diversity and accuracy, we extend Hitting Time and propose efficient Absorbing Time algorithm to help users find their favorite long tail items. Finally, we refine the Absorbing Time algorithm and propose two entropy-biased Absorbing Cost algorithms to distinguish the variation on different user-item rating pairs, which further enhances the effectiveness of long tail recommendation. Empirical experiments on two real life datasets show that our proposed algorithms are effective to recommend long tail items and outperform state-of-the-art recommendation techniques.

Solving quadratically constrained convex optimization problems with an interior-point method

The paper describes the design of our interior-point implementation to solve large-scale quadratically constrained convex optimization problems. We outline the details of the implemented algorithm, which is based on the primal-dual interior-point method. Our discussion includes topics related to starting point strategies and to the implementation of the numerical algebra employed, with emphasis on sparsity and stability issues. Computational results are given on a demonstrative set of convex quadratically constrained quadratic problems.

A Personalized Recommendation Algorithm on Integration of Item Semantic Similarity and Item Rating Similarity

With the rapid development of the Internet and the wide application of e-commerce, recommender system has become a necessity and collaborative filtering is the most successful technology for building recommendation systems. There are many problems in the recommendation approaches, such as data sparsity problem, the issue of new items and scalability issues. Item-based collaborative filtering algorithms can improve the scalability and the traditional user-based collaborative filtering methods, to avoid the bottlenecks of computing users’ correlations by considering the relationships among items. But it still worked poor in solving the issues of sparsity, predictions for new items. In order to effectively solve several problems, this paper presented a recommendation algorithm on integration of item semantic similarity and item rating similarity. The item semantic similarity is calculated combining Earth Mover's Distance and Proportional Transportation Distance, which can utilize the semantic information to measure the similarity between two items based on a solution to the transportation problem from linear optimization1. Then producing recommendation used item-based collaborative filtering integrating the semantic similarity and rating similarity. The presented approach can effectively alleviate the sparsity problem in e-commerce recommender systems.

A Hybrid Probabilistic Model for Unified Collaborative and Content-Based Image Tagging

The increasing availability of large quantities of user contributed images with labels has provided opportunities to develop automatic tools to tag images to facilitate image search and retrieval. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid probabilistic model (HPM) which integrates low-level image features and high-level user provided tags to automatically tag images. For images without any tags, HPM predicts new tags based solely on the low-level image features. For images with user provided tags, HPM jointly exploits both the image features and the tags in a unified probabilistic framework to recommend additional tags to label the images. The HPM framework makes use of the tag-image association matrix (TIAM). However, since the number of images is usually very large and user-provided tags are diverse, TIAM is very sparse, thus making it difficult to reliably estimate tag-to-tag co-occurrence probabilities. We developed a collaborative filtering method based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) for tackling this data sparsity issue. Also, an L1 norm kernel method is used to estimate the correlations between image features and semantic concepts. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been evaluated using three databases containing 5,000 images with 371 tags, 31,695 images with 5,587 tags, and 269,648 images with 5,018 tags, respectively.

Hybrid recommendations for mobile commerce based on mobile phone features

AbstractMobile data communications have evolved as the number of third generation (3G) subscribers has increased. The evolution has triggered an increase in the use of mobile devices, such as mobile phones, to conduct mobile commerce and mobile shopping on the mobile web. There are fewer products to browse on the mobile web; hence, one‐to‐one marketing with product recommendations is important. Typical collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation systems make recommendations to potential customers based on the purchase behaviour of customers with similar preferences. However, this method may suffer from the so‐called sparsity problem, which means there may not be sufficient similar users because the user‐item rating matrix is sparse. In mobile shopping environments, the features of users' mobile phones provide different functionalities for using mobile services; thus, the features may be used to identify users with similar purchase behaviour. In this paper, we propose a mobile phone feature (MPF)‐based hybrid method to resolve the sparsity issue of the typical CF method in mobile environments. We use the features of mobile phones to identify users' characteristics and then cluster users into groups with similar interests. The hybrid method combines the MPF‐based method and a preference‐based method that uses association rule mining to extract recommendation rules from user groups and make recommendations. Our experiment results show that the proposed hybrid method performs better than other recommendation methods.

Multi-level learning: improving the prediction of protein, domain and residue interactions by allowing information flow between levels

BackgroundProteins interact through specific binding interfaces that contain many residues in domains. Protein interactions thus occur on three different levels of a concept hierarchy: whole-proteins, domains, and residues. Each level offers a distinct and complementary set of features for computationally predicting interactions, including functional genomic features of whole proteins, evolutionary features of domain families and physical-chemical features of individual residues. The predictions at each level could benefit from using the features at all three levels. However, it is not trivial as the features are provided at different granularity.ResultsTo link up the predictions at the three levels, we propose a multi-level machine-learning framework that allows for explicit information flow between the levels. We demonstrate, using representative yeast interaction networks, that our algorithm is able to utilize complementary feature sets to make more accurate predictions at the three levels than when the three problems are approached independently. To facilitate application of our multi-level learning framework, we discuss three key aspects of multi-level learning and the corresponding design choices that we have made in the implementation of a concrete learning algorithm. 1) Architecture of information flow: we show the greater flexibility of bidirectional flow over independent levels and unidirectional flow; 2) Coupling mechanism of the different levels: We show how this can be accomplished via augmenting the training sets at each level, and discuss the prevention of error propagation between different levels by means of soft coupling; 3) Sparseness of data: We show that the multi-level framework compounds data sparsity issues, and discuss how this can be dealt with by building local models in information-rich parts of the data. Our proof-of-concept learning algorithm demonstrates the advantage of combining levels, and opens up opportunities for further research.AvailabilityThe software and a readme file can be downloaded at . The programs are written in Java, and can be run on any platform with Java 1.4 or higher and Apache Ant 1.7.0 or higher installed. The software can be used without a license.

Employing User Attribute and Item Attribute to Enhance the Collaborative Filtering Recommendation

Recommender systems are web based systems that aim at predicting a customer's interest on available products and services by relying on previously rated products and dealing with the problem of information and product overload. Collaborative filtering is the most popular recommendation technique nowadays and it mainly employs the user item rating data set . Traditional collaborative filtering approaches compute a similarity value between the target user and each other user by computing the relativity of their ratin gs , which is the set of ratings given on the same items. Based on the ratings of the most similar users, commonly referred to as neighbors, the algorithms compute recommendations for the target user. They only consider the ratings information. User attribute information associated with a user's personality and item attribute information associated with a n item's inside are rarely considered in the collaborative filtering recommendation process. In this paper, a new collaborative filtering personalized recommendation algorithm is proposed which employs the user attribute information and the item attribute information . This approach combines the user rating similarity and the user attribute similarity in the user based collaborative filtering process to fill the vacant ratings where necessary, and then it combines the item rating similarity and the item attribute similarity in the item based collaborative filtering process to produce recommendations . The hybrid collaborative filtering employs the user attribute and item attribute can alleviate the sparsity issue in the recommender systems.