No Arabic abstract
Influenced by the stunning success of deep learning in computer vision and language understanding, research in recommendation has shifted to inventing new recommender models based on neural networks. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing neural recommender models, which generalize and surpass traditional recommender models owing to the strong representation power of neural networks. In this survey paper, we conduct a systematic review on neural recommender models, aiming to summarize the field to facilitate future progress. Distinct from existing surveys that categorize existing methods based on the taxonomy of deep learning techniques, we instead summarize the field from the perspective of recommendation modeling, which could be more instructive to researchers and practitioners working on recommender systems. Specifically, we divide the work into three types based on the data they used for recommendation modeling: 1) collaborative filtering models, which leverage the key source of user-item interaction data; 2) content enriched models, which additionally utilize the side information associated with users and items, like user profile and item knowledge graph; and 3) context enriched models, which account for the contextual information associated with an interaction, such as time, location, and the past interactions. After reviewing representative works for each type, we finally discuss some promising directions in this field, including benchmarking recommender systems, graph reasoning based recommendation models, and explainable and fair recommendations for social good.
The item cold-start problem seriously limits the recommendation performance of Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods when new items have either none or very little interactions. To solve this issue, many modern Internet applications propose to predict a new items interaction from the possessing contents. However, it is difficult to design and learn a map between the items interaction history and the corresponding contents. In this paper, we apply the Wasserstein distance to address the item cold-start problem. Given item content information, we can calculate the similarity between the interacted items and cold-start ones, so that a users preference on cold-start items can be inferred by minimizing the Wasserstein distance between the distributions over these two types of items. We further adopt the idea of CF and propose Wasserstein CF (WCF) to improve the recommendation performance on cold-start items. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of WCF over state-of-the-art approaches.
With increasing and extensive use of electronic health records, clinicians are often under time pressure when they need to retrieve important information efficiently among large amounts of patients health records in clinics. While a search function can be a useful alternative to browsing through a patients record, it is cumbersome for clinicians to search repeatedly for the same or similar information on similar patients. Under such circumstances, there is a critical need to build effective recommender systems that can generate accurate search term recommendations for clinicians. In this manuscript, we developed a hybrid collaborative filtering model using patients encounter and search term information to recommend the next search terms for clinicians to retrieve important information fast in clinics. For each patient, the model will recommend terms that either have high co-occurrence frequencies with his/her most recent ICD codes or are highly relevant to the most recent search terms on this patient. We have conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate the proposed model, and the experimental results demonstrate that our model can outperform all the state-of-the-art baseline methods for top-N search term recommendation on different datasets.
This paper proposes CF-NADE, a neural autoregressive architecture for collaborative filtering (CF) tasks, which is inspired by the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) based CF model and the Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator (NADE). We first describe the basic CF-NADE model for CF tasks. Then we propose to improve the model by sharing parameters between different ratings. A factored version of CF-NADE is also proposed for better scalability. Furthermore, we take the ordinal nature of the preferences into consideration and propose an ordinal cost to optimize CF-NADE, which shows superior performance. Finally, CF-NADE can be extended to a deep model, with only moderately increased computational complexity. Experimental results show that CF-NADE with a single hidden layer beats all previous state-of-the-art methods on MovieLens 1M, MovieLens 10M, and Netflix datasets, and adding more hidden layers can further improve the performance.
With the increasing scale and diversification of interaction behaviors in E-commerce, more and more researchers pay attention to multi-behavior recommender systems that utilize interaction data of other auxiliary behaviors such as view and cart. To address these challenges in heterogeneous scenarios, non-sampling methods have shown superiority over negative sampling methods. However, two observations are usually ignored in existing state-of-the-art non-sampling methods based on binary regression: (1) users have different preference strengths for different items, so they cannot be measured simply by binary implicit data; (2) the dependency across multiple behaviors varies for different users and items. To tackle the above issue, we propose a novel non-sampling learning framework named underline{C}riterion-guided underline{H}eterogeneous underline{C}ollaborative underline{F}iltering (CHCF). CHCF introduces both upper and lower bounds to indicate selection criteria, which will guide user preference learning. Besides, CHCF integrates criterion learning and user preference learning into a unified framework, which can be trained jointly for the interaction prediction on target behavior. We further theoretically demonstrate that the optimization of Collaborative Metric Learning can be approximately achieved by CHCF learning framework in a non-sampling form effectively. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that CHCF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in heterogeneous scenarios.
A growing proportion of human interactions are digitized on social media platforms and subjected to algorithmic decision-making, and it has become increasingly important to ensure fair treatment from these algorithms. In this work, we investigate gender bias in collaborative-filtering recommender systems trained on social media data. We develop neural fair collaborative filtering (NFCF), a practical framework for mitigating gender bias in recommending sensitive items (e.g. jobs, academic concentrations, or courses of study) using a pre-training and fine-tuning approach to neural collaborative filtering, augmented with bias correction techniques. We show the utility of our methods for gender de-biased career and college major recommendations on the MovieLens dataset and a Facebook dataset, respectively, and achieve better performance and fairer behavior than several state-of-the-art models.