István Pilászy

Recommending new movies: even a few ratings are more valuable than metadata

The Netflix Prize (NP) competition gave much attention to collaborative filtering (CF) approaches. Matrix factorization (MF) based CF approaches assign low dimensional feature vectors to users and items. We link CF and content-based filtering (CBF) by finding a linear transformation that transforms user or item descriptions so that they are as close as possible to the feature vectors generated by MF for CF. We propose methods for explicit feedback that are able to handle 140,000 features when feature vectors are very sparse. With movie metadata collected for the NP movies we show that the prediction performance of the methods is comparable to that of CF, and can be used to predict user preferences on new movies. We also investigate the value of movie metadata compared to movie ratings in regards of predictive power. We compare our solely CBF approach with a simple baseline rating-based predictor. We show that even 10 ratings of a new movie are more valuable than its metadata for predicting user ratings.

Investigation of various matrix factorization methods for large recommender systems

Matrix factorization (MF) based approaches have proven to be efficient for rating-based recommendation systems. In this work, we propose several matrix factorization approaches with improved prediction accuracy. We introduce a novel and fast (semi)-positive MF approach that approximates the features by using positive values for either users or items. We describe a momentum-based MF approach. A transductive version of MF is also introduced, which uses information from test instances (namely the ratings users have given for certain items) to improve prediction accuracy. We describe an incremental variant of MF that efficiently handles new users/ratings, which is crucial in a real-life recommender system. A hybrid MF--neighbor-based method is also discussed that further improves the performance of MF.The proposed methods are evaluated on the Netflix Prize dataset, and we show that they can achieve very favorable Quiz RMSE (best single method: 0.8904, combination: 0.8841) and running time.

Matrix factorization and neighbor based algorithms for the netflix prize problem

Collaborative filtering (CF) approaches proved to be effective for recommender systems in predicting user preferences in item selection using known user ratings of items. This subfield of machine learning has gained a lot of popularity with the Netflix Prize competition started in October 2006. Two major approaches for this problem are matrix factorization (MF) and the neighbor based approach (NB). In this work, we propose various variants of MF and NB that can boost the performance of the usual ensemble based scheme. First, we investigate various regularization scenarios for MF. Second, we introduce two NB methods: one is based on correlation coefficients and the other on linear least squares. At the experimentation part, we show that the proposed approaches compare favorably with existing ones in terms of prediction accuracy and/or required training time. We present results of blending the proposed methods.

Fast als-based matrix factorization for explicit and implicit feedback datasets

Alternating least squares (ALS) is a powerful matrix factorization (MF) algorithm for both explicit and implicit feedback based recommender systems. As shown in many articles, increasing the number of latent factors (denoted by K) boosts the prediction accuracy of MF based recommender systems, including ALS as well. The price of the better accuracy is paid by the increased running time: the running time of the original version of ALS is proportional to K3. Yet, the running time of model building can be important in recommendation systems; if the model cannot keep up with the changing item portfolio and/or user profile, the prediction accuracy can be degraded. In this paper we present novel and fast ALS variants both for the implicit and explicit feedback datasets, which offers better trade-off between running time and accuracy. Due to the significantly lower computational complexity of the algorithm - linear in terms of K - the model being generated under the same amount of time is more accurate, since the faster training enables to build model with more latent factors. We demonstrate the efficiency of our ALS variants on two datasets using two performance measures, RMSE and average relative position (ARP), and show that either a significantly more accurate model can be generated under the same amount of time or a model with similar prediction accuracy can be created faster; for explicit feedback the speed-up factor can be even 5-10.

A unified approach of factor models and neighbor based methods for large recommender systems

Matrix factorization (MF) based approaches have proven to be efficient for rating-based recommendation systems. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach that alloys an improved MF and the so-called NSVD1 approach, resulting in a very accurate factor model. After that, we propose a unification of factor models and neighbor based approaches, which further improves the performance. The approaches are evaluated on the Netflix Prize dataset, and they provide very low RMSE, and favorable running time. Our best solution presented here with Quiz RMSE 0.8851 outperforms all published single methods in the literature.

Applications of the conjugate gradient method for implicit feedback collaborative filtering

The need for solving weighted ridge regression (WRR) problems arises in a number of collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms. Often, there is not enough time to calculate the exact solution of the WRR problem, or it is not required. The conjugate gradient (CG) method is a state-of-the-art approach for the approximate solution of WRR problems. In this paper, we investigate some applications of the CG method for new and existing implicit feedback CF models. We demonstrate through experiments on the Netflix dataset that CG can be an efficient tool for training implicit feedback CF models.

Visualization of movie features in collaborative filtering

In this paper we will describe a modification of the matrix factorization (MF) algorithm which allows visualizing the user and item characteristics. When applying MF for collaborative filtering, we get a model that represents the attributes of users and items by feature vectors. Some elements of these vectors may have understandable meaning for humans but due to the lack of internal connections between the feature vectors, these are difficult to visualize. In this paper we give a detailed description of a MF method enabling better visualization of features by arranging them into a 2D map, where via the calculation of the feature values we try to position features with similar “meaning” close to each other. To achieve this first we define a neighborhood relation on features, then we modify the MF so that we introduce a new term in the error function which penalize the difference between the neighbor features. We show that this modification slightly decrease the accuracy of the model but we get well visualized feature maps. On the feature maps meanings can be associated with regions, and so we can provide an interesting explanation for the user why he/she was recommended the movie. Such plausible explanations may result in that users will better understand how the system works, which can also increase customer loyalty towards the service provider.

Computational Complexity Reduction for Factorization-Based Collaborative Filtering Algorithms

Alternating least squares (ALS) is a powerful matrix factorization (MF) algorithm for both implicit and explicit feedback based recommender systems. We show that by using the Sherman-Morrison formula (SMF), we can reduce the computational complexity of several ALS based algorithms. It also reduces the complexity of greedy forward and backward feature selection algorithms by an order of magnitude. We propose linear kernel ridge regression (KRR) for users with few ratings. We show that both SMF and KRR can efficiently handle new ratings.

Constructing Large Margin Polytope Classifiers with a Multiclass Classification Algorithm

In this paper we present two new algorithms to solve non-linearly separable classification problems. First we propose a modification of a multiclass support vector machine, which for binary classification tasks can always find a convex polytope that includes the points of one class and excludes the others, if possible. Next we present a generalization of this approach for multiclass problems, where a non-convex polytope can be found for each class, so that each polytope contains the points of its corresponding class, and excludes other points. Some promising preliminary results are presented for two dimensional artificial datasets.