Traditional Recommender Systems Research Articles

Dynamic Personalized Recipe Recommendations Based on Facial Health Recognition

Nowadays, the demand for more personalized healthy food recipes is increasing over time, but traditional personalized recipe recommendation systems often tend to overlook the differences that exist in different users’ health conditions. This paper aims to address the issue by proposing an innovative personalized health recipe recommendation framework. This framework is based on different health needs, aiming to address users with different health conditions. More explicitly, the hybrid recommendation algorithm based on facial health recognition is designed to recommend the most suitable recipes for the user by taking into account the user’s health status and preferences. In addition, the fitness factor will adjust the recommendation results to best meet the user’s taste preferences and health goals. Experimental results and user research results show that the recommendation results of this framework are more accurate compared to existing systems, and therefore, users are more satisfied.

A Federated Social Recommendation Approach with Enhanced Hypergraph Neural Network

In recent years, the development of online social network platforms has led to increased research efforts in social recommendation systems. Unlike traditional recommendation systems, social recommendation systems utilize both user-item interactions and user-user social relations to recommend relevant items, taking into account social homophily and social influence. Graph neural network (GNN) based social recommendation methods have been proposed to model these item interactions and social relations effectively. However, existing GNN-based methods rely on centralized training, which raises privacy concerns and faces challenges in data collection due to regulations and privacy restrictions. Federated learning has emerged as a privacy-preserving alternative. Combining federated learning with GNN-based methods for social recommendation can leverage their respective advantages, but it also introduces new challenges: 1) existing federated recommendation systems often lack the capability to process heterogeneous data, such as user-item interactions and social relations; 2) due to the sparsity of data distributed across different clients, capturing the higher-order relationship information among users becomes challenging and is often overlooked by most federated recommendation systems. To overcome these challenges, we propose a federated social recommendation approach with enhanced hypergraph neural network. We introduce hypergraph graph neural networks (HGNN) to learn user and item embeddings in federated recommendation systems, leveraging the hypergraph structure to address the heterogeneity of data. Based on carefully crafted triangular motifs, we merge user and item nodes to construct hypergraphs on local clients, capturing specific triangular relations. Multiple HGNN channels are used to encode different categories of high-order relations, and an attention mechanism is applied to aggregate the embedded information from these channels. Our experiments on real-world social recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Extensive experiment results on three publicly available datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Graph-based dynamic attribute clipping for conversational recommendation

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) enable traditional recommender systems to interact with users by asking questions about their preferences and recommending items. Conversation recommendation has made significant progress, however, studies on attribute-aware conversational recommendation have overlooked the problem that after obtaining the candidate attribute set, the relevance of the attributes in the candidate attribute set to the user’s current preferred attributes is not further considered, resulting in the existence of many user-uninterested attributes in the candidate attribute set. This seriously affects the dialogue quality and reduces the user’s patience, decreasing recommendation accuracy. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new framework called Attribute Clipping based on Dynamic Graph (ACDG). In ACDG, firstly, the reasoning module uses the restriction property of graph structure to obtain a large set of candidate attributes, and then the attribute clipping module filters out the attributes with high relevance to the current user’s preferred attributes. Thus, ACDG can obtain a better-quality set of candidate attributes. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark CRS datasets, we validate the effectiveness of the method.

Deep Learning-Powered Financial Product Recommendation System in Banks

With the rapid evolution of financial technology, the recommendation system for financial products, as a crucial technology to enhance user experience and reduce information search costs, is increasingly becoming the focus of the financial services sector. As market competition intensifies, the diversity of user demands, coupled with the continuous expansion of financial product types, has exposed limitations in traditional recommendation systems regarding accuracy and personalized services. Therefore, this study aims to explore the application of deep learning technology in the field of financial product recommendations, aiming to construct a more intelligent and precise financial product recommendation system. The metrics we focus on include precision, recall, and F1-score, comprehensively evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed methods. In terms of methodology, we first employ a Transformer model, leveraging its powerful self-attention mechanism to capture the complex relationships between user behavior sequences and financial product information.

Meta graph network recommendation based on multi-behavior encoding

As traditional recommendation systems ignore the hidden information among different user behaviors (such as clicks, add-to-favorites, add-to-cart, and purchases), this often leads to low accuracy in recommendation results. We propose a meta-graph network recommendation system via multi-behavior encoding (MBGR). Firstly, the graph convolutional neural network is used to extract features from various interactive behavior heterogeneous graphs of user-items for behavior heterogeneous modeling. Secondly, matrix decomposition algorithm and meta-knowledge learner are used respectively to process the semantic information of user behavior, and then attention mechanism is used to learn and distinguish the importance of different types of user item interaction behaviors. Finally, meta-knowledge transfer network is used to combine meta-learning paradigm and neural network framework to establish user target behavior recommendation. We conducted comparative experiments comparing MBGR with 7 different baseline models such as NCF and DMF. Extensive experiments on three real datasets (Tmall, Yelp, ML10M) demonstrate that the proposed MBGR method outperforms the baselines. The performance of MBGR is improved by 10.97 % on average with the metric of HR@10 and 10.96 % with the metric of NDCG@10. Under different top-N value evaluation conditions (HR@10, HR@7, NDCG@10, NDCG@7, etc.), the proposed model's performance can also be improved by more than 10 %, which proves the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed MBGR method.

Simulation of E-learning in English personalized learning recommendation system based on Markov chain algorithm and adaptive learning algorithm

The research topic of this article is the English personalized learning recommendation module based on Markov chain algorithm and adaptive learning algorithm. Personalized learning recommendation systems have been widely applied in the field of education. Firstly, this article uses Markov chain algorithm to analyze user learning behavior data, abstract user learning behavior as a process of state transition, predict their future behavior based on their past behavior, better understand their learning needs and interests, and provide more personalized learning recommendations for them. Subsequently, combined with adaptive learning algorithms, recommendation strategies and content are dynamically adjusted based on the user's learning goals and level, providing more accurate and effective learning recommendations according to their personalized needs and learning progress. By comparing with traditional recommendation systems, evaluate the accuracy and personalization of the recommendation module to better meet the learning needs of users.

A cutting-edge artificial intelligence paradigm for entertainment-infused music recommendations

Personalized and fascinating music recommendations are becoming increasingly in demand as the advent of technology continues to change the way that people consume music. Traditional music recommendation systems primarily rely on user listening history and preferences, often neglecting the emotional and experiential dimensions that make music a deeply personal and entertaining endeavour. This research introduces a music recommendation system after classifying the tracks using a novel Gravitational Search Optimized Recursive Neural Networks (GS-RNN) approach. GS-RNN addressed this gap by integrating the Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) with Recursive Neural Networks (RNN) to create a content-based recommendation system that assesses auudio signal similarity. Evaluation metrics, including accuracy (80%), logarithmic loss (0.85), precision (84%), recall (83%), and F1-score (88%), demonstrate GS-RNN’s superiority over existing techniques. Genre-specific accuracy analysis further underscores the model’s capability to suggest songs within the same genre. Overall, GS-RNN presents a novel and effective paradigm for music recommendations.

Formalizing Multimedia Recommendation through Multimodal Deep Learning

Recommender systems (RSs) provide customers with a personalized navigation experience within the vast catalogs of products and services offered on popular online platforms. Despite the substantial success of traditional RSs, recommendation remains a highly challenging task, especially in specific scenarios and domains. For example, human affinity for items described through multimedia content (e.g., images, audio, and text), such as fashion products, movies, and music, is multi-faceted and primarily driven by their diverse characteristics. Therefore, by leveraging all available signals in such scenarios, multimodality enables us to tap into richer information sources and construct more refined user/item profiles for recommendations. Despite the growing number of multimodal techniques proposed for multimedia recommendation, the existing literature lacks a shared and universal schema for modeling and solving the recommendation problem through the lens of multimodality. Given the recent advances in multimodal deep learning for other tasks and scenarios where precise theoretical and applicative procedures exist, we also consider it imperative to formalize a general multimodal schema for multimedia recommendation. In this work, we first provide a comprehensive literature review of multimodal approaches for multimedia recommendation from the last eight years. Second, we outline the theoretical foundations of a multimodal pipeline for multimedia recommendation by identifying and formally organizing recurring solutions/patterns; at the same time, we demonstrate its rationale by conceptually applying it to selected state-of-the-art approaches in multimedia recommendation. Third, we conduct a benchmarking analysis of recent algorithms for multimedia recommendation within Elliot, a rigorous framework for evaluating recommender systems, where we re-implement such multimedia recommendation approaches. Finally, we highlight the significant unresolved challenges in multimodal deep learning for multimedia recommendation and suggest possible avenues for addressing them. The primary aim of this work is to provide guidelines for designing and implementing the next generation of multimodal approaches in multimedia recommendation.

A Dual Perspective Framework of Knowledge-correlation for Cross-domain Recommendation

Recommender System provides users with online services in a personalized way. The performance of traditional recommender systems may deteriorate because of problems such as cold-start and data sparsity. Cross-domain Recommendation System utilizes the richer information from auxiliary domains to guide the task in the target domain. However, direct knowledge transfer may lead to a negative impact due to data heterogeneity and feature mismatch between domains. In this article, we innovatively explore the cross-domain correlation from the perspectives of content semanticity and structural connectivity to fully exploit the information of Knowledge Graph. First, we adopt domain adaptation that automatically extracts transferable features to capture cross-domain semantic relations. Second, we devise a knowledge-aware graph neural network to explicitly model the high-order connectivity across domains. Third, we develop feature fusion strategies to combine the advantages of semantic and structural information. By simulating the cold-start scenario on two real-world datasets, the experimental results show that our proposed method has superior performance in accuracy and diversity compared with the SOTA methods. It demonstrates that our method can accurately predict users’ expressed preferences while exploring their potential diverse interests.

Discovering Personalized Semantics for Soft Attributes in Recommender Systems using Concept Activation Vectors

Interactive recommender systems have emerged as a promising paradigm to overcome the limitations of the primitive user feedback used by traditional recommender systems (e.g., clicks, item consumption, ratings). They allow users to express intent, preferences, constraints, and contexts in a richer fashion, often using natural language (including faceted search and dialogue). Yet more research is needed to find the most effective ways to use this feedback. One challenge is inferring a user’s semantic intent from the open-ended terms or attributes often used to describe a desired item. This is critical for recommender systems that wish to support users in their everyday, intuitive use of natural language to refine recommendation results. Leveraging concept activation vectors (CAVs) [ 26 ], a recently developed approach for model interpretability in machine learning, we develop a framework to learn a representation that captures the semantics of such attributes and connects them to user preferences and behaviors in recommender systems. One novel feature of our approach is its ability to distinguish objective and subjective attributes (both subjectivity of degree and of sense ), and associate different senses of subjective attributes with different users. We demonstrate on both synthetic and real-world data sets that our CAV representation not only accurately interprets users’ subjective semantics, but can also be used to improve recommendations through interactive item critiquing .

Generating Usage-related Questions for Preference Elicitation in Conversational Recommender Systems

A key distinguishing feature of conversational recommender systems over traditional recommender systems is theirability to elicit user preferences using natural language. Currently, the predominant approach to preference elicitation is to ask questions directly about items or item attributes. Users searching for recommendations may not have deep knowledge of the available options in a given domain. As such, they might not be aware of key attributes or desirable values for them. However, in many settings, talking about the planned use of items does not present any difficulties, even for those that are new to a domain. In this article, we propose a novel approach to preference elicitation by asking implicit questions based on item usage. As one of the main contributions of this work, we develop a multi-stage data annotation protocol using crowdsourcing, to create a high-quality labeled training dataset. Another main contribution is the development of four models for the question generation task: two template-based baseline models and two neural text-to-text models. The template-based models use heuristically extracted common patterns found in the training data, while the neural models use the training data to learn to generate questions automatically. Using common metrics from machine translation for automatic evaluation, we show that our approaches are effective in generating elicitation questions, even with limited training data. We further employ human evaluation for comparing the generated questions using both pointwise and pairwise evaluation designs. We find that the human evaluation results are consistent with the automatic ones, allowing us to draw conclusions about the quality of the generated questions with certainty. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of cases where the models show their limitations.

From Traditional Recommender Systems to GPT-Based Chatbots: A Survey of Recent Developments and Future Directions

Recommender systems are a key technology for many applications, such as e-commerce, streaming media, and social media. Traditional recommender systems rely on collaborative filtering or content-based filtering to make recommendations. However, these approaches have limitations, such as the cold start and the data sparsity problem. This survey paper presents an in-depth analysis of the paradigm shift from conventional recommender systems to generative pre-trained-transformers-(GPT)-based chatbots. We highlight recent developments that leverage the power of GPT to create interactive and personalized conversational agents. By exploring natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques, we investigate how GPT models can better understand user preferences and provide context-aware recommendations. The paper further evaluates the advantages and limitations of GPT-based recommender systems, comparing their performance with traditional methods. Additionally, we discuss potential future directions, including the role of reinforcement learning in refining the personalization aspect of these systems.

Deep Causal Reasoning for Recommendations

Traditional recommender systems aim to estimate a user’s rating to an item based on observed ratings from the population. As with all observational studies, hidden confounders, which are factors that affect both item exposures and user ratings, lead to a systematic bias in the estimation. Consequently, causal inference has been introduced in recommendations to address the influence of unobserved confounders. Observing that confounders in recommendations are usually shared among items and are therefore multi-cause confounders, we model the recommendation as a multi-cause multi-outcome (MCMO) inference problem. Specifically, to remedy the confounding bias, we estimate user-specific latent variables that render the item exposures independent Bernoulli trials. The generative distribution is parameterized by a DNN with factorized logistic likelihood and the intractable posteriors are estimated by variational inference. Controlling these factors as substitute confounders, under mild assumptions, can eliminate the bias incurred by multi-cause confounders. Furthermore, we show that MCMO modeling may lead to high variance due to scarce observations associated with the high-dimensional treatment space. Therefore, we theoretically demonstrate that controlling user features as pre-treatment variables can substantially improve sample efficiency and alleviate overfitting. Empirical studies on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed deep causal recommender shows more robustness to unobserved confounders than state-of-the-art causal recommenders. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/yaochenzhu/Deep-Deconf.

Performance analysis of three recommendation algorithms on Amazon datasets

Recommendation systems play a crucial role in enhancing user satisfaction and driving sales for businesses. They are essential in todays marketplaces, as they are able to suggest products and services that may interest a particular individual based on their past purchases. In this paper, empirical research is conducted on three distinct subsets of the Amazon dataset, namely Sports & Outdoors, Movies & TV, and Video Games, to comprehensively evaluate the performance of three distinct recommendation methods based on deep learning algorithms. These methods include the dot product method, (an updated version of the singular value decomposition algorithm), the neural network method, and the neural collaborative filtering model with natural language processing method. The results of this study reveal that deep learning-based recommendation systems can achieve more accurate results compared to traditional recommendation systems for three types of products. The implementation of these methods on Amazons dataset can help improve sales by correctly identifying customers interests and suggesting relevant items.

Emotion-oriented recommender system for personalized control of indoor environmental quality

Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) significantly influences health, cognitive abilities, and even moods. With the rise of smart homes and the Internet of Things (IoT), the need for personalized IEQ control has become paramount. Traditional systems, primarily focusing on explicit feedback (i.e., preference), often neglect the role of emotions in shaping this feedback. Therefore, this study presents the Emotion-oriented Recommender System for personalized control of IEQ (ERS-IEQ), based on the R-E-C-S ontology, focusing on (i) Recognizing user's continuous emotional states, (ii) Estimating emotional similarity between users, (iii) Collecting user's feedback on IEQ conditions, and (iv) Systemizing an emotion-oriented recommender system using a graph neural network. In order to confirm the predictive performance of the ERS-IEQ and verify its higher level of excellence compared to traditional recommender systems, a private dataset composed of IEQ conditions, users' explicit feedback, and users' emotional states was built via a human participant experiment using a climate chamber. As a result, the ERS-IEQ significantly enhances the recommender system's predictive performance, particularly in thermal preferences. The number of linguistic terms of emotional similarity has a profound effect on the system's predictions, with four terms proving most effective. In the near future, ERS-IEQ will play a role as a personal assistant in smart home automation, offering emotion-based recommendations. It addresses key challenges in traditional recommender systems, such as the cold start problem and rating sparsity, and ensures personalized adjustments to IEQ conditions in both private and public spaces.

SEEUNRS: Semantically Enriched Entity-Based Urdu News Recommendation System

The advancement in the production, distribution, and consumption of news has fostered easy access to the news with fair challenges. The main challenge is to present the right news to the right audience. The news recommendation system is one of the technological solutions to this problem. Much work has been done on news recommendation systems for the major languages of the world, but trivial work has been done for resource-poor languages like Urdu. Another significant hurdle in the development of an efficient news recommendation system is the scarcity of an accessible and suitable Urdu dataset. To this end, an Urdu news mobile application was used to collect the news data and user feedback for 1 month. After refinement, the first-ever Urdu dataset of 100 users and 23,250 news was curated for the Urdu news recommendation system. In addition, SEEUNRS , a semantically enriched entity-based Urdu news recommendation system, is proposed. The proposed scheme exploits the hidden features of a news article and entities to suggest the right article to the right audience. Results have shown that the presented model has an improvement of 6.9% in the F1 measure from traditional recommendation system techniques.

Eliminating bias: enhancing children's book recommendation using a hybrid model of graph convolutional networks and neural matrix factorization.

Managing user bias in large-scale user review data is a significant challenge in optimizing children's book recommendation systems. To tackle this issue, this study introduces a novel hybrid model that combines graph convolutional networks (GCN) based on bipartite graphs and neural matrix factorization (NMF). This model aims to enhance the precision and efficiency of children's book recommendations by accurately capturing user biases. In this model, the complex interactions between users and books are modeled as a bipartite graph, with the users' book ratings serving as the weights of the edges. Through GCN and NMF, we can delve into the structure of the graph and the behavioral patterns of users, more accurately identify and address user biases, and predict their future behaviors. Compared to traditional recommendation systems, our hybrid model excels in handling large-scale user review data. Experimental results confirm that our model has significantly improved in terms of recommendation accuracy and scalability, positively contributing to the advancement of children's book recommendation systems.

Towards interactive explanation-based nutrition virtual coaching systems.

The awareness about healthy lifestyles is increasing, opening to personalized intelligent health coaching applications. A demand for more than mere suggestions and mechanistic interactions has driven attention to nutrition virtual coaching systems (NVC) as a bridge between human-machine interaction and recommender, informative, persuasive, and argumentation systems. NVC can rely on data-driven opaque mechanisms. Therefore, it is crucial to enable NVC to explain their doing (i.e., engaging the user in discussions (via arguments) about dietary solutions/alternatives). By doing so, transparency, user acceptance, and engagement are expected to be boosted. This study focuses on NVC agents generating personalized food recommendations based on user-specific factors such as allergies, eating habits, lifestyles, and ingredient preferences. In particular, we propose a user-agent negotiation process entailing run-time feedback mechanisms to react to both recommendations and related explanations. Lastly, the study presents the findings obtained by the experiments conducted with multi-background participants to evaluate the acceptability and effectiveness of the proposed system. The results indicate that most participants value the opportunity to provide feedback and receive explanations for recommendations. Additionally, the users are fond of receiving information tailored to their needs. Furthermore, our interactive recommendation system performed better than the corresponding traditional recommendation system in terms of effectiveness regarding the number of agreements and rounds.

Explicit Behavior Interaction with Heterogeneous Graph for Multi-behavior Recommendation

AbstractMulti-behavior recommendation systems exploit multi-type user–item interactions (e.g., clicking, adding to cart and collecting) as auxiliary behaviors for user modeling, which can alleviate the problem of data sparsity faced by traditional recommendation systems. The key point of multi-behavior recommendation systems is to make full use of the auxiliary behavior information for the learning of user preferences. However, there are two challenges in existing methods that need to be explored: (1) capturing personalized user preferences based on multiple auxiliary behaviors, especially for negative feedback signals; and (2) explicitly modeling the semantics between auxiliary and target behaviors, and learning the explicit interactions between multiple behaviors. To tackle the two problems described above, we propose a novel model, called explicit behavior interaction with heterogeneous graph for multi-behavior recommendation (MB-EBIH). In particular, we first construct a heterogeneous behavior graph, including both positive and negative behaviors. A pre-trained model based on graph neural network (GNN) is then used to generate explicit behavior interaction values as the edge weights for the heterogeneous behavior graph. These weights reflect the importance of each of the auxiliary behaviors in an explicit manner. Finally, the extracted explicit behavior interaction information is incorporated into the multi-behavior user–item bipartite graphs to learn better representations. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in terms of exploring multi-behavioral data; and ablation and analysis experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit behavior interaction information.

Download Behavior Analysis Based on Google Play Store Data

As mobile apps continue to grow, app stores, as the main channel for users to download apps, are becoming increasingly important for developers and platforms. Understanding users 'download behavior and accurately predicting users' preferences and needs can effectively improve the effect of the recommendation system in the application mall, improve user experience and improve the download conversion rate. However, traditional rule-based recommender systems often face the problems of data sparsity and model complexity. Therefore, it is an urgent and valuable topic to analyze user download behavior combined with machine learning technology and to provide personalized recommendations and services. This study uses the download behavior information of Google Play Store users in 2018, and use three classic machine algorithms (linear regression, random forest and SVM) to model and predict the software rating, dig deep into various factors affecting the rating, and gain deep insight into users' preferences and behavior patterns. This will provide more accurate recommendation results for the application mall, improve the application quality and popularity, and improve the user satisfaction and loyalty, and provide an important reference for optimizing the recommendation system and personalized service of the application mall.