Recommender Systems Chu-Yu Hsu 20150319
Jul 14, 2015
Who am I?Chu-Yu Hsu Data Scientist @ IBM Taiwan Dedicated to Recommender System [email protected] https://github.com/ChuyuHsu
Outline• What is Recommender System
• Related Algorithms
• Content Based Algorithms
• Collaborative Filtering (CF)
• Latent Factor Model
• Going Any Further
• More choices necessitate better filters
• Example:
• Books, movies, music, news articles, products
• People
Types of Recommenders
• Editorial and hand curated
• Simple aggregates
• Tailored to individual users
Netflix Prize
• An open competition to predict user ratings for films
• Algorithms are evaluated in the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)
Content Based RecommenderMain idea: Recommend items to customer x similar to previous items rated highly by x
Pros 1.No need for data of other
users
2. Able to recommend to users with unique tastes
3. Able to recommend new & unpopular items
4. Explanations for recommendations
Cons 1.Finding appropriate
features is hard
2. Overspecialisation
3. Cold-start for new users
Collaborative FilteringMain idea: Find set N of other users whose ratings are “similar” to X’s ratings
Similarity
• Jaccard Similarity
• Cosine Similarity
• Centered Cosine SimilarityNormalize ratings by subtracting row meanAlso known as Pearson Correlation
Item Based v.s. User Based• In theory user based CF and item based CF are dual
• Item based CF usually outperforms user-based in many use cases
• Items are "simpler" than users
• Items belong to a small set of "genres", users have varied tastes
• Item similarity is more meaningful than User Similarity
• SVD should be a intuitive choice
• But R has missing entries
• SVD assumes all missing entries are zero
• Ignore the missing entries
• Forget to be orthogonal/unit length
Alternative Least Squares• Because p and q are both unknown, the object
function is not convex
• If fix one of the unknowns -> can be solved as a least squares problem
Overfitting• To solve overfitting we introduce regularization:
• Allow rich model where there are sufficient data
• Shrink aggressively where data are scarce
What’s More• Prediction accuracy won’t always be the most
important
• Recentness
• Novelty
• Explanation based diversity
• Temporary diversity
Open Problems
• How to weight different behaviors
• How to improve deferent metrics
• How to evaluate and evolve
References
• Anand Rajaraman and Jeffrey David Ullman. 2011. Mining of Massive Datasets. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA.
• 项亮. 2012. 推荐系统实践. ⼈人⺠民邮电出版社, 北京