Case study on Recommender Systems

Agenda:
• About Recommender System
• Recommendation Tasks
• Recommendation Techniques
• Final Remarks
About Recommender Systems:
• Recommendation engines are a subclass of machine learning which generally deal with ranking or
rating products / users. Loosely defined, a recommender system is a system which predicts ratings a
user might give to a specific item. These predictions will then be ranked and returned back to the
user.

• The most common types of recommendation systems which are widely used are :

• Content-Based Filtering

• Collaborative Filtering

• Hybrid Recommendation Systems

Fig 1: Types of reccommended Systems
• One approach to the design of recommender systems that has wide use is collaborative filtering. Collaborative
filtering is based on the assumption that people who agreed in the past will agree in the future, and that they
will like similar kinds of items as they liked in the past.
The system generates recommendations using only information about rating profiles for different users or
items. By locating peer users/items with a rating history similar to the current user or item, they generate
recommendations using this neighborhood.
Collaborative filtering methods are classified as memory-based and model-based. A well-known example of
memory-based approaches is the user-based algorithm,while that of model-based approaches is Matrix
Factorization.
• Content Based apporach
• Content-based filtering methods are based on a description of the item and a profile of the
user's preferences. These methods are best suited to situations where there is known data on
an item (name, location, description, etc.), but not on the user.

• Content-based recommenders treat recommendation as a user-specific classification problem

and learn a classifier for the user's likes and dislikes based on an item's features
• Hybrid recommendations approaches
• Hybrid approaches can be implemented in several ways are by making content-based and
collaborative-based predictions separately and then combining them and by adding content-
based capabilities to a collaborative-based approach or by unifying the approaches into one
mode.

• Several studies that empirically compare the performance of the hybrid with the pure
collaborative and content-based methods and demonstrated that the hybrid methods can
provide more accurate recommendations than pure approaches.

• These methods can also be used to overcome some of the common problems in recommender
systems such as cold start and the sparsity problem, as well as the knowledge engineering
bottleneck in knowledge-based approaches.

• Netflix is a good example of the use of hybrid recommender systems

• Feedback

• Recommender systems require certain feedback to perform recommendations. That is why they
require information on users’ past behavior, the behavior of other people, or the content
information of the domain to produce predictions. It is possible to define the workflow of a
recommendation process as:

• Collecting information

• Learning.

• Production recommendations.

• There are often three main ways for a recommender to collect information, which also known as
feedback.
• Implicit Feedback

• Explicit Feedback

• Hybrid Feedback
Implicit Feedback:
• There is no user participation required to gather implicit feedback, unlike the explicit feedback. The
system automatically tracks users’ preferences by monitoring the performed actions, such as which item they
visited, where they clicked, which items they purchased, or how long they stayed on a web page.

• One must find the correct actions to track based on the domain that the recommender system operates on.
Another advantage of implicit feedback is that it reduces the cold start problems that occur until an item is
rated enough to be served as a recommendation.
Explicit Feedback
• To collect explicit feedback from the user, the system must ask users to provide their
ratings for items. After collecting the feedback, the system knows how relevant or similar an item is to users’
preferences. Even though this allows the recommender to learn the users exact opinion, since it requires direct
participation from the user, it is often not easy to collect.
• That is why there are different ways to collect feedback from users. Implementing a like/dislike functionality
into a web site, gives users to evaluate the content easily. Alternatively, the system can ask users to insert their
ratings in which a discrete numeric scale represents how the user liked/disliked the content. Netfix often asks
customers to rate movies .
• About Recommender System
• Recommendation Tasks
• Recommendation Techniques
• Final Remarks
Recommendation Tasks:

• A recommendation task can be defined as a constraint satisfaction problem

(VC, VPROD, CC ∪CF ∪CR ∪CPROD) where VC is a set of variables representing possible customer
requirements and VPROD is a set of variables describing product properties.

• CPROD is a set of constraints describing product instances, CR is a set of constraints describing possible
combinations of customer requirements, and CF (also called filter conditions) is a set of constraints
describing the relationship between customer requirements and product properties.

• Finally, CC is a set of unary constraints representing concrete customer requirements.

• Problem Solving Approaches of Recommendation Tasks:

• constraintsatisfaction algorithms

• conjunctive database queries

Constraint Satisfaction
• Solutions for constraint satisfaction problems are calculated on the basis of search
algorithms that use different combinations of backtracking and constraint propagation.

Conjunctive Database Queries

• Solutions to conjunctive queries are calculated on the basis of database queries that try to
retrieve items which fulfill all of the defined customer requirements.
• About Recommender System
• Recommendation Tasks
• Recommendation Techniques
• Final Remarks
Recommendation Techniques :
Content-based:
• The system learns to recommend items that are similar to the ones that the user liked in the past. The similarity of items is calculated

based on the features associated with the compared items.

• For example, if a user has positively rated a movie that belongs to the comedy genre, then the system can learn to recommend other

movies from this genre. Chapter 3 provides an overview of contentbased recommender systems, imposing some order among the

extensive and diverse aspects involved in their design and implementation.

• It presents the basic concepts and terminology of content-based RSs, their high level architecture, and their main advantages and

drawbacks. The chapter then surveys state-of-the-art systems that have been adopted in several application domains.

• The survey encompasses a thorough description of both classical and advanced techniques for representing items and user profiles.

Finally, it discusses trends and future research which might lead towards the next generation of recommender systems.
Collaborative filtering:

• The simplest and original implementation of this approach

recommends to the active user the items that other users with similar tastes liked in the past.
The similarity in taste of two users is calculated based on the similarity in the rating history of
the users.

• This is the reason why refers to collaborative filtering as “people-to-people correlation.”

Collaborative filtering is considered to be the most popular and widely implemented
technique in RS.
 Demographic:

• This type of system recommends items based on the demographic profile of the user. The
assumption is that different recommendations should be generated for different demographic niches.
Many Web sites adopt simple and effective personalization solutions based on demographics.

• For example, users are dispatched to particular Web sites based on their language or country. Or
suggestions may be customized according to the age of the user. While these approaches have been
quite popular in the marketing literature, there has been relatively little proper RS research into
demographic systems.

Knowledge-based:
• Knowledge-based systems recommend items based on specific domain knowledge
about how certain item features meet users needs and preferences and, ultimately, how the item is
useful for the user. Notable knowledgebased recommender systems are case-based .
Community-based:

• This type of system recommends items based on the preferences of the

users friends. This technique follows the epigram “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you
who you are”. Evidence suggests that people tend to rely more on recommendations from their
friends than on recommendations from similar but anonymous individuals.

• This observation, combined with the growing popularity of open social networks, is generating a
rising interest in community-based systems or, as or as they usually referred to, social
recommender systems.

• This type of RSs models and acquires information about the social relations of the users and the
preferences of the user’s friends. The recommendation is based on ratings that were provided by the
user’s friends.

• In fact these RSs are following the rise of social-networks and enable a simple and comprehensive
acquisition of data related to the social relations of the users.
Hybrid recommender systems:
• These RSs are based on the combination of the above mentioned
techniques. A hybrid system combining techniques A and B tries to use the advantages of A to fix the
disadvantages of B. For instance, CF methods suffer from new-item problems, i.e. they cannot
recommend items that have no ratings.
• This does not limit content-based approaches since the prediction for new items is based on their
description (features) that are typically easily available.
• Given two (or more) basic RSs techniques, several ways have been proposed for combining them to
create a new hybrid system
• About Recommender System
• Recommendation Tasks
• Recommendation Techniques
• Final Remarks
Final Remarks :

• recommendation algorithms can be divided in two great paradigms: collaborative approaches (such as
user-user, item-item and matrix factorisation) that are only based on user-item interaction matrix and
content based approaches (such as regression or classification models) that use prior information about
users and/or items

• memory based collaborative methods do not assume any latent model and have then low bias but high
variance model based collaborative approaches assume a latent interactions model that needs to learn
both users and items representations from scratch and have, so, a higher bias but a lower variance
content based methods assume a latent model build around users and/or items features explicitly given
and have, thus, the highest bias and lowest variance

• recommender systems are more and more important in many big industries and some scales
considerations have to be taken into account when designing the system (better use of sparsity, iterative
methods for factorisation or optimisation, approximate techniques for nearest neighbours search…)