• Title/Summary/Keyword: Cold-Start Recommendation Problem

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Clustering Method based on Genre Interest for Cold-Start Problem in Movie Recommendation (영화 추천 시스템의 초기 사용자 문제를 위한 장르 선호 기반의 클러스터링 기법)

  • You, Tithrottanak;Rosli, Ahmad Nurzid;Ha, Inay;Jo, Geun-Sik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.1
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    • pp.57-77
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    • 2013
  • Social media has become one of the most popular media in web and mobile application. In 2011, social networks and blogs are still the top destination of online users, according to a study from Nielsen Company. In their studies, nearly 4 in 5active users visit social network and blog. Social Networks and Blogs sites rule Americans' Internet time, accounting to 23 percent of time spent online. Facebook is the main social network that the U.S internet users spend time more than the other social network services such as Yahoo, Google, AOL Media Network, Twitter, Linked In and so on. In recent trend, most of the companies promote their products in the Facebook by creating the "Facebook Page" that refers to specific product. The "Like" option allows user to subscribed and received updates their interested on from the page. The film makers which produce a lot of films around the world also take part to market and promote their films by exploiting the advantages of using the "Facebook Page". In addition, a great number of streaming service providers allows users to subscribe their service to watch and enjoy movies and TV program. They can instantly watch movies and TV program over the internet to PCs, Macs and TVs. Netflix alone as the world's leading subscription service have more than 30 million streaming members in the United States, Latin America, the United Kingdom and the Nordics. As the matter of facts, a million of movies and TV program with different of genres are offered to the subscriber. In contrast, users need spend a lot time to find the right movies which are related to their interest genre. Recent years there are many researchers who have been propose a method to improve prediction the rating or preference that would give the most related items such as books, music or movies to the garget user or the group of users that have the same interest in the particular items. One of the most popular methods to build recommendation system is traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF). The method compute the similarity of the target user and other users, which then are cluster in the same interest on items according which items that users have been rated. The method then predicts other items from the same group of users to recommend to a group of users. Moreover, There are many items that need to study for suggesting to users such as books, music, movies, news, videos and so on. However, in this paper we only focus on movie as item to recommend to users. In addition, there are many challenges for CF task. Firstly, the "sparsity problem"; it occurs when user information preference is not enough. The recommendation accuracies result is lower compared to the neighbor who composed with a large amount of ratings. The second problem is "cold-start problem"; it occurs whenever new users or items are added into the system, which each has norating or a few rating. For instance, no personalized predictions can be made for a new user without any ratings on the record. In this research we propose a clustering method according to the users' genre interest extracted from social network service (SNS) and user's movies rating information system to solve the "cold-start problem." Our proposed method will clusters the target user together with the other users by combining the user genre interest and the rating information. It is important to realize a huge amount of interesting and useful user's information from Facebook Graph, we can extract information from the "Facebook Page" which "Like" by them. Moreover, we use the Internet Movie Database(IMDb) as the main dataset. The IMDbis online databases that consist of a large amount of information related to movies, TV programs and including actors. This dataset not only used to provide movie information in our Movie Rating Systems, but also as resources to provide movie genre information which extracted from the "Facebook Page". Formerly, the user must login with their Facebook account to login to the Movie Rating System, at the same time our system will collect the genre interest from the "Facebook Page". We conduct many experiments with other methods to see how our method performs and we also compare to the other methods. First, we compared our proposed method in the case of the normal recommendation to see how our system improves the recommendation result. Then we experiment method in case of cold-start problem. Our experiment show that our method is outperform than the other methods. In these two cases of our experimentation, we see that our proposed method produces better result in case both cases.

Toward Preventing Cold-start Problem: Basis Recommendation System (콜드스타트 문제 완화를 위한 기저속성 추출 기반 추천시스템 제안)

  • Jungseob Lee;Hyeonseok Moon;Chanjun Park;Myunghoon Kang;Seungjun Lee;Sungmin Ahn;Jeongbae Park;Heuiseok Lim
    • Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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    • 2022.10a
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    • pp.427-430
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    • 2022
  • 추천시스템에서 콜드스타트 문제를 해결하기 위해 다양한 연구들이 진행되고 있다. 하지만, 대부분의 연구는 아직도 사용자 기반의 히스토리 데이터셋을 반드시 필요로 하여, 콜드스타트 문제를 완벽히 해결하지 못하고 있다. 이에 본 논문은 콜드스타트 문제를 완화할 수 있는 기저속성 기반의 추천시스템을 제안한다. 제안하는 방법론을 검증하기 위해, 직접 수집한 한국어 영화 리뷰 데이터셋을 기반으로 성능을 검증하였으며, 평가 결과 제안한 방법론이 키워드와 사용자의 리뷰 점수를 효과적으로 반영한 추천시스템임을 확인할 수 있었고, 데이터 희소성 및 콜드스타트 문제를 완화하여 기존의 텍스트 기반 랭킹 시스템의 성능을 압도하는 것을 확인하였다. 더 나아가 제안된 기저속성 추천시스템은 추론 시에 GPU 컴퓨팅 자원을 요구하지 않기에 서비스 측면에서도 많은 이점이 있음을 확인하였다.

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Case Study of Big Data-Based Agri-food Recommendation System According to Types of Customers (빅데이터 기반 소비자 유형별 농식품 추천시스템 구축 사례)

  • Moon, Junghoon;Jang, Ikhoon;Choe, Young Chan;Kim, Jin Gyo;Bock, Gene
    • The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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    • v.40 no.5
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    • pp.903-913
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    • 2015
  • The Korea Agency of Education, Promotion and Information Service in Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries launched a public data portal service in January 2015. The service provides customized information for consumers through an agri-food recommendation system built-in portal service. The recommendation system has fallowing characteristics. First, the system can increase recommendation accuracy by using a wide variety of agri-food related data, including SNS opinion mining, consumer's purchase data, climate data, and wholesale price data. Second, the system uses segmentation method based on consumer's lifestyle and megatrends factors to overcome the cold start problem. Third, the system recommends agri-foods to users reflecting various preference contextual factors by using recommendation algorithm, dirichlet-multinomial distribution. In addition, the system provides diverse information related to recommended agri-foods to increase interest in agri-food of service users.

Resolving the 'Gray sheep' Problem Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) in Collaborative Filtering (CF) Recommender Systems (소셜 네트워크 분석 기법을 활용한 협업필터링의 특이취향 사용자(Gray Sheep) 문제 해결)

  • Kim, Minsung;Im, Il
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.20 no.2
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    • pp.137-148
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    • 2014
  • Recommender system has become one of the most important technologies in e-commerce in these days. The ultimate reason to shop online, for many consumers, is to reduce the efforts for information search and purchase. Recommender system is a key technology to serve these needs. Many of the past studies about recommender systems have been devoted to developing and improving recommendation algorithms and collaborative filtering (CF) is known to be the most successful one. Despite its success, however, CF has several shortcomings such as cold-start, sparsity, gray sheep problems. In order to be able to generate recommendations, ordinary CF algorithms require evaluations or preference information directly from users. For new users who do not have any evaluations or preference information, therefore, CF cannot come up with recommendations (Cold-star problem). As the numbers of products and customers increase, the scale of the data increases exponentially and most of the data cells are empty. This sparse dataset makes computation for recommendation extremely hard (Sparsity problem). Since CF is based on the assumption that there are groups of users sharing common preferences or tastes, CF becomes inaccurate if there are many users with rare and unique tastes (Gray sheep problem). This study proposes a new algorithm that utilizes Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques to resolve the gray sheep problem. We utilize 'degree centrality' in SNA to identify users with unique preferences (gray sheep). Degree centrality in SNA refers to the number of direct links to and from a node. In a network of users who are connected through common preferences or tastes, those with unique tastes have fewer links to other users (nodes) and they are isolated from other users. Therefore, gray sheep can be identified by calculating degree centrality of each node. We divide the dataset into two, gray sheep and others, based on the degree centrality of the users. Then, different similarity measures and recommendation methods are applied to these two datasets. More detail algorithm is as follows: Step 1: Convert the initial data which is a two-mode network (user to item) into an one-mode network (user to user). Step 2: Calculate degree centrality of each node and separate those nodes having degree centrality values lower than the pre-set threshold. The threshold value is determined by simulations such that the accuracy of CF for the remaining dataset is maximized. Step 3: Ordinary CF algorithm is applied to the remaining dataset. Step 4: Since the separated dataset consist of users with unique tastes, an ordinary CF algorithm cannot generate recommendations for them. A 'popular item' method is used to generate recommendations for these users. The F measures of the two datasets are weighted by the numbers of nodes and summed to be used as the final performance metric. In order to test performance improvement by this new algorithm, an empirical study was conducted using a publically available dataset - the MovieLens data by GroupLens research team. We used 100,000 evaluations by 943 users on 1,682 movies. The proposed algorithm was compared with an ordinary CF algorithm utilizing 'Best-N-neighbors' and 'Cosine' similarity method. The empirical results show that F measure was improved about 11% on average when the proposed algorithm was used

    . Past studies to improve CF performance typically used additional information other than users' evaluations such as demographic data. Some studies applied SNA techniques as a new similarity metric. This study is novel in that it used SNA to separate dataset. This study shows that performance of CF can be improved, without any additional information, when SNA techniques are used as proposed. This study has several theoretical and practical implications. This study empirically shows that the characteristics of dataset can affect the performance of CF recommender systems. This helps researchers understand factors affecting performance of CF. This study also opens a door for future studies in the area of applying SNA to CF to analyze characteristics of dataset. In practice, this study provides guidelines to improve performance of CF recommender systems with a simple modification.

  • Social Network : A Novel Approach to New Customer Recommendations (사회연결망 : 신규고객 추천문제의 새로운 접근법)

    • Park, Jong-Hak;Cho, Yoon-Ho;Kim, Jae-Kyeong
      • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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      • v.15 no.1
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      • pp.123-140
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      • 2009
    • Collaborative filtering recommends products using customers' preferences, so it cannot recommend products to the new customer who has no preference information. This paper proposes a novel approach to new customer recommendations using the social network analysis which is used to search relationships among social entities such as genetics network, traffic network, organization network, etc. The proposed recommendation method identifies customers most likely to be neighbors to the new customer using the centrality theory in social network analysis and recommends products those customers have liked in the past. The procedure of our method is divided into four phases : purchase similarity analysis, social network construction, centrality-based neighborhood formation, and recommendation generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted several experiments using a data set from a department store in Korea. Our method was compared with the best-seller-based method that uses the best-seller list to generate recommendations for the new customer. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the best-seller-based method as measured by F1-measure.

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    Financial Products Recommendation System Using Customer Behavior Information (고객의 투자상품 선호도를 활용한 금융상품 추천시스템 개발)

    • Hyojoong Kim;SeongBeom Kim;Hee-Woong Kim
      • Information Systems Review
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      • v.25 no.1
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      • pp.111-128
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      • 2023
    • With the development of artificial intelligence technology, interest in data-based product preference estimation and personalized recommender systems is increasing. However, if the recommendation is not suitable, there is a risk that it may reduce the purchase intention of the customer and even extend to a huge financial loss due to the characteristics of the financial product. Therefore, developing a recommender system that comprehensively reflects customer characteristics and product preferences is very important for business performance creation and response to compliance issues. In the case of financial products, product preference is clearly divided according to individual investment propensity and risk aversion, so it is necessary to provide customized recommendation service by utilizing accumulated customer data. In addition to using these customer behavioral characteristics and transaction history data, we intend to solve the cold-start problem of the recommender system, including customer demographic information, asset information, and stock holding information. Therefore, this study found that the model proposed deep learning-based collaborative filtering by deriving customer latent preferences through characteristic information such as customer investment propensity, transaction history, and financial product information based on customer transaction log records was the best. Based on the customer's financial investment mechanism, this study is meaningful in developing a service that recommends a high-priority group by establishing a recommendation model that derives expected preferences for untraded financial products through financial product transaction data.

    A personalized recommendation procedure with contextual information (상황 정보를 이용한 개인화 추천 방법 개발)

    • Moon, Hyun Sil;Choi, Il Young;Kim, Jae Kyeong
      • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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      • v.21 no.1
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      • pp.15-28
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      • 2015
    • As personal devices and pervasive technologies for interacting with networked objects continue to proliferate, there is an unprecedented world of scattered pieces of contextualized information available. However, the explosive growth and variety of information ironically lead users and service providers to make poor decision. In this situation, recommender systems may be a valuable alternative for dealing with these information overload. But they failed to utilize various types of contextual information. In this study, we suggest a methodology for context-aware recommender systems based on the concept of contextual boundary. First, as we suggest contextual boundary-based profiling which reflects contextual data with proper interpretation and structure, we attempt to solve complexity problem in context-aware recommender systems. Second, in neighbor formation with contextual information, our methodology can be expected to solve sparsity and cold-start problem in traditional recommender systems. Finally, we suggest a methodology about context support score-based recommendation generation. Consequently, our methodology can be first step for expanding application of researches on recommender systems. Moreover, as we suggest a flexible model with consideration of new technological development, it will show high performance regardless of their domains. Therefore, we expect that marketers or service providers can easily adopt according to their technical support.

    Recommender Systems using Structural Hole and Collaborative Filtering (구조적 공백과 협업필터링을 이용한 추천시스템)

    • Kim, Mingun;Kim, Kyoung-Jae
      • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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      • v.20 no.4
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      • pp.107-120
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      • 2014
    • This study proposes a novel recommender system using the structural hole analysis to reflect qualitative and emotional information in recommendation process. Although collaborative filtering (CF) is known as the most popular recommendation algorithm, it has some limitations including scalability and sparsity problems. The scalability problem arises when the volume of users and items become quite large. It means that CF cannot scale up due to large computation time for finding neighbors from the user-item matrix as the number of users and items increases in real-world e-commerce sites. Sparsity is a common problem of most recommender systems due to the fact that users generally evaluate only a small portion of the whole items. In addition, the cold-start problem is the special case of the sparsity problem when users or items newly added to the system with no ratings at all. When the user's preference evaluation data is sparse, two users or items are unlikely to have common ratings, and finally, CF will predict ratings using a very limited number of similar users. Moreover, it may produces biased recommendations because similarity weights may be estimated using only a small portion of rating data. In this study, we suggest a novel limitation of the conventional CF. The limitation is that CF does not consider qualitative and emotional information about users in the recommendation process because it only utilizes user's preference scores of the user-item matrix. To address this novel limitation, this study proposes cluster-indexing CF model with the structural hole analysis for recommendations. In general, the structural hole means a location which connects two separate actors without any redundant connections in the network. The actor who occupies the structural hole can easily access to non-redundant, various and fresh information. Therefore, the actor who occupies the structural hole may be a important person in the focal network and he or she may be the representative person in the focal subgroup in the network. Thus, his or her characteristics may represent the general characteristics of the users in the focal subgroup. In this sense, we can distinguish friends and strangers of the focal user utilizing the structural hole analysis. This study uses the structural hole analysis to select structural holes in subgroups as an initial seeds for a cluster analysis. First, we gather data about users' preference ratings for items and their social network information. For gathering research data, we develop a data collection system. Then, we perform structural hole analysis and find structural holes of social network. Next, we use these structural holes as cluster centroids for the clustering algorithm. Finally, this study makes recommendations using CF within user's cluster, and compare the recommendation performances of comparative models. For implementing experiments of the proposed model, we composite the experimental results from two experiments. The first experiment is the structural hole analysis. For the first one, this study employs a software package for the analysis of social network data - UCINET version 6. The second one is for performing modified clustering, and CF using the result of the cluster analysis. We develop an experimental system using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) of Microsoft Excel 2007 for the second one. This study designs to analyzing clustering based on a novel similarity measure - Pearson correlation between user preference rating vectors for the modified clustering experiment. In addition, this study uses 'all-but-one' approach for the CF experiment. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we apply three comparative types of CF models to the same dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the other comparative models. In especial, the proposed model significantly performs better than two comparative modes with the cluster analysis from the statistical significance test. However, the difference between the proposed model and the naive model does not have statistical significance.

    A Multi-Agent framework for Distributed Collaborative Filtering (분산 환경에서의 협력적 여과를 위한 멀티 에이전트 프레임워크)

    • Ji, Ae-Ttie;Yeon, Cheol;Lee, Seung-Hun;Jo, Geun-Sik;Kim, Heung-Nam
      • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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      • v.13 no.3
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      • pp.119-140
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      • 2007
    • Recommender systems enable a user to decide which information is interesting and valuable in our world of information overload. As the recent studies of distributed computing environment have been progressing actively, recommender systems, most of which were centralized, have changed toward a peer-to-peer approach. Collaborative Filtering (CF), one of the most successful technologies in recommender systems, presents several limitations, namely sparsity, scalability, cold start, and the shilling problem, in spite of its popularity. The move from centralized systems to distributed approaches can partially improve the issues; distrust of recommendation and abuses of personal information. However, distributed systems can be vulnerable to attackers, who may inject biased profiles to force systems to adapt their objectives. In this paper, we consider both effective CF in P2P environment in order to improve overall performance of system and efficient solution of the problems related to abuses of personal data and attacks of malicious users. To deal with these issues, we propose a multi-agent framework for a distributed CF focusing on the trust relationships between individuals, i.e. web of trust. We employ an agent-based approach to improve the efficiency of distributed computing and propagate trust information among users with effect. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method brings significant improvement in terms of the distributed computing of similarity model building and the robustness of system against malicious attacks. Finally, we are planning to study trust propagation mechanisms by taking trust decay problem into consideration.

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    Extension Method of Association Rules Using Social Network Analysis (사회연결망 분석을 활용한 연관규칙 확장기법)

    • Lee, Dongwon
      • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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      • v.23 no.4
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      • pp.111-126
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      • 2017
    • Recommender systems based on association rule mining significantly contribute to seller's sales by reducing consumers' time to search for products that they want. Recommendations based on the frequency of transactions such as orders can effectively screen out the products that are statistically marketable among multiple products. A product with a high possibility of sales, however, can be omitted from the recommendation if it records insufficient number of transactions at the beginning of the sale. Products missing from the associated recommendations may lose the chance of exposure to consumers, which leads to a decline in the number of transactions. In turn, diminished transactions may create a vicious circle of lost opportunity to be recommended. Thus, initial sales are likely to remain stagnant for a certain period of time. Products that are susceptible to fashion or seasonality, such as clothing, may be greatly affected. This study was aimed at expanding association rules to include into the list of recommendations those products whose initial trading frequency of transactions is low despite the possibility of high sales. The particular purpose is to predict the strength of the direct connection of two unconnected items through the properties of the paths located between them. An association between two items revealed in transactions can be interpreted as the interaction between them, which can be expressed as a link in a social network whose nodes are items. The first step calculates the centralities of the nodes in the middle of the paths that indirectly connect the two nodes without direct connection. The next step identifies the number of the paths and the shortest among them. These extracts are used as independent variables in the regression analysis to predict future connection strength between the nodes. The strength of the connection between the two nodes of the model, which is defined by the number of nodes between the two nodes, is measured after a certain period of time. The regression analysis results confirm that the number of paths between the two products, the distance of the shortest path, and the number of neighboring items connected to the products are significantly related to their potential strength. This study used actual order transaction data collected for three months from February to April in 2016 from an online commerce company. To reduce the complexity of analytics as the scale of the network grows, the analysis was performed only on miscellaneous goods. Two consecutively purchased items were chosen from each customer's transactions to obtain a pair of antecedent and consequent, which secures a link needed for constituting a social network. The direction of the link was determined in the order in which the goods were purchased. Except for the last ten days of the data collection period, the social network of associated items was built for the extraction of independent variables. The model predicts the number of links to be connected in the next ten days from the explanatory variables. Of the 5,711 previously unconnected links, 611 were newly connected for the last ten days. Through experiments, the proposed model demonstrated excellent predictions. Of the 571 links that the proposed model predicts, 269 were confirmed to have been connected. This is 4.4 times more than the average of 61, which can be found without any prediction model. This study is expected to be useful regarding industries whose new products launch quickly with short life cycles, since their exposure time is critical. Also, it can be used to detect diseases that are rarely found in the early stages of medical treatment because of the low incidence of outbreaks. Since the complexity of the social networking analysis is sensitive to the number of nodes and links that make up the network, this study was conducted in a particular category of miscellaneous goods. Future research should consider that this condition may limit the opportunity to detect unexpected associations between products belonging to different categories of classification.


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