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This paper proposes Medley of Sub-Attention Networks (MoSAN), a new novel neural architecture for the group recommendation task. Group-level recommendation is known to be a challenging task, in which intricate group dynamics have to be considered. As such, this is to be contrasted with the standard recommendation problem where recommendations are personalized with respect to a single user. Our proposed approach hinges upon the key intuition that the decision making process (in groups) is generally dynamic, i.e., a users decision is highly dependent on the other group members. All in all, our key motivation manifests in a form of an attentive neural model that captures fine-grained interactions between group members. In our MoSAN model, each sub-attention module is representative of a single member, which models a users preference with respect to all other group members. Subsequently, a Medley of Sub-Attention modules is then used to collectively make the groups final decision. Overall, our proposed model is both expressive and effective. Via a series of extensive experiments, we show that MoSAN not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also improves standard baselines by a considerable margin.
A user can be represented as what he/she does along the history. A common way to deal with the user modeling problem is to manually extract all kinds of aggregated features over the heterogeneous behaviors, which may fail to fully represent the data itself due to limited human instinct. Recent works usually use RNN-based methods to give an overall embedding of a behavior sequence, which then could be exploited by the downstream applications. However, this can only preserve very limited information, or aggregated memories of a person. When a downstream application requires to facilitate the modeled user features, it may lose the integrity of the specific highly correlated behavior of the user, and introduce noises derived from unrelated behaviors. This paper proposes an attention based user behavior modeling framework called ATRank, which we mainly use for recommendation tasks. Heterogeneous user behaviors are considered in our model that we project all types of behaviors into multiple latent semantic spaces, where influence can be made among the behaviors via self-attention. Downstream applications then can use the user behavior vectors via vanilla attention. Experiments show that ATRank can achieve better performance and faster training process. We further explore ATRank to use one unified model to predict different types of user behaviors at the same time, showing a comparable performance with the highly optimized individual models.
Next destination recommendation is an important task in the transportation domain of taxi and ride-hailing services, where users are recommended with personalized destinations given their current origin location. However, recent recommendation works do not satisfy this origin-awareness property, and only consider learning from historical destination locations, without origin information. Thus, the resulting approaches are unable to learn and predict origin-aware recommendations based on the users current location, leading to sub-optimal performance and poor real-world practicality. Hence, in this work, we study the origin-aware next destination recommendation task. We propose the Spatial-Temporal Origin-Destination Personalized Preference Attention (STOD-PPA) encoder-decoder model to learn origin-origin (OO), destination-destination (DD), and origin-destination (OD) relationships by first encoding both origin and destination sequences with spatial and temporal factors in local and global views, then decoding them through personalized preference attention to predict the next destination. Experimental results on seven real-world user trajectory taxi datasets show that our model significantly outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art methods.
Recommending medications for patients using electronic health records (EHRs) is a crucial data mining task for an intelligent healthcare system. It can assist doctors in making clinical decisions more efficiently. However, the inherent complexity of the EHR data renders it as a challenging task: (1) Multilevel structures: the EHR data typically contains multilevel structures which are closely related with the decision-making pathways, e.g., laboratory results lead to disease diagnoses, and then contribute to the prescribed medications; (2) Multiple sequences interactions: multiple sequences in EHR data are usually closely correlated with each other; (3) Abundant noise: lots of task-unrelated features or noise information within EHR data generally result in suboptimal performance. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a multilevel selective and interactive network (MeSIN) for medication recommendation. Specifically, MeSIN is designed with three components. First, an attentional selective module (ASM) is applied to assign flexible attention scores to different medical codes embeddings by their relevance to the recommended medications in every admission. Second, we incorporate a novel interactive long-short term memory network (InLSTM) to reinforce the interactions of multilevel medical sequences in EHR data with the help of the calibrated memory-augmented cell and an enhanced input gate. Finally, we employ a global selective fusion module (GSFM) to infuse the multi-sourced information embeddings into final patient representations for medications recommendation. To validate our method, extensive experiments have been conducted on a real-world clinical dataset. The results demonstrate a consistent superiority of our framework over several baselines and testify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Biomedical researchers use ontologies to annotate their data with ontology terms, enabling better data integration and interoperability. However, the number, variety and complexity of current biomedical ontologies make it cumbersome for researchers to determine which ones to reuse for their specific needs. To overcome this problem, in 2010 the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) released the Ontology Recommender, which is a service that receives a biomedical text corpus or a list of keywords and suggests ontologies appropriate for referencing the indicated terms. We developed a new version of the NCBO Ontology Recommender. Called Ontology Recommender 2.0, it uses a new recommendation approach that evaluates the relevance of an ontology to biomedical text data according to four criteria: (1) the extent to which the ontology covers the input data; (2) the acceptance of the ontology in the biomedical community; (3) the level of detail of the ontology classes that cover the input data; and (4) the specialization of the ontology to the domain of the input data. Our evaluation shows that the enhanced recommender provides higher quality suggestions than the original approach, providing better coverage of the input data, more detailed information about their concepts, increased specialization for the domain of the input data, and greater acceptance and use in the community. In addition, it provides users with more explanatory information, along with suggestions of not only individual ontologies but also groups of ontologies. It also can be customized to fit the needs of different scenarios. Ontology Recommender 2.0 combines the strengths of its predecessor with a range of adjustments and new features that improve its reliability and usefulness. Ontology Recommender 2.0 recommends over 500 biomedical ontologies from the NCBO BioPortal platform, where it is openly available.
Recent studies identified that sequential Recommendation is improved by the attention mechanism. By following this development, we propose Relation-Aware Kernelized Self-Attention (RKSA) adopting a self-attention mechanism of the Transformer with augmentation of a probabilistic model. The original self-attention of Transformer is a deterministic measure without relation-awareness. Therefore, we introduce a latent space to the self-attention, and the latent space models the recommendation context from relation as a multivariate skew-normal distribution with a kernelized covariance matrix from co-occurrences, item characteristics, and user information. This work merges the self-attention of the Transformer and the sequential recommendation by adding a probabilistic model of the recommendation task specifics. We experimented RKSA over the benchmark datasets, and RKSA shows significant improvements compared to the recent baseline models. Also, RKSA were able to produce a latent space model that answers the reasons for recommendation.