• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.249-263
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• 2023

Collaborative Filtering, a representative recommendation system methodology, consists of two approaches: neighbor methods and latent factor models. Among these, the latent factor model using matrix factorization decomposes the user-item interaction matrix into two lower-dimensional rectangular matrices, predicting the item's rating through the product of these matrices. Due to the factor vectors inferred from rating patterns capturing user and item characteristics, this method is superior in scalability, accuracy, and flexibility compared to neighbor-based methods. However, it has a fundamental drawback: the need to reflect the diversity of preferences of different individuals for items with no ratings. This limitation leads to repetitive and inaccurate recommendations. The Adaptive Deep Latent Factor Model (ADLFM) was developed to address this issue. This model adaptively learns the preferences for each item by using the item description, which provides a detailed summary and explanation of the item. ADLFM takes in item description as input, calculates latent vectors of the user and item, and presents a method that can reflect personal diversity using an attention score. However, due to the requirement of a dataset that includes item descriptions, the domain that can apply ADLFM is limited, resulting in generalization limitations. This study proposes a Generalized Adaptive Deep Latent Factor Recommendation Model, G-ADLFRM, to improve the limitations of ADLFM. Firstly, we use item ID, commonly used in recommendation systems, as input instead of the item description. Additionally, we apply improved deep learning model structures such as Self-Attention, Multi-head Attention, and Multi-Conv1D. We conducted experiments on various datasets with input and model structure changes. The results showed that when only the input was changed, MAE increased slightly compared to ADLFM due to accompanying information loss, resulting in decreased recommendation performance. However, the average learning speed per epoch significantly improved as the amount of information to be processed decreased. When both the input and the model structure were changed, the best-performing Multi-Conv1d structure showed similar performance to ADLFM, sufficiently counteracting the information loss caused by the input change. We conclude that G-ADLFRM is a new, lightweight, and generalizable model that maintains the performance of the existing ADLFM while enabling fast learning and inference.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.85-109
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• 2018

Recommender system recommends the items expected to be purchased by a customer in the future according to his or her previous purchase behaviors. It has been served as a tool for realizing one-to-one personalization for an e-commerce service company. Traditional recommender systems, especially the recommender systems based on collaborative filtering (CF), which is the most popular recommendation algorithm in both academy and industry, are designed to generate the items list for recommendation by using 'overall rating' - a single criterion. However, it has critical limitations in understanding the customers' preferences in detail. Recently, to mitigate these limitations, some leading e-commerce companies have begun to get feedback from their customers in a form of 'multicritera ratings'. Multicriteria ratings enable the companies to understand their customers' preferences from the multidimensional viewpoints. Moreover, it is easy to handle and analyze the multidimensional ratings because they are quantitative. But, the recommendation using multicritera ratings also has limitation that it may omit detail information on a user's preference because it only considers three-to-five predetermined criteria in most cases. Under this background, this study proposes a novel hybrid recommendation system, which selectively uses the results from 'traditional CF' and 'CF using multicriteria ratings'. Our proposed system is based on the premise that some people have holistic preference scheme, whereas others have composite preference scheme. Thus, our system is designed to use traditional CF using overall rating for the users with holistic preference, and to use CF using multicriteria ratings for the users with composite preference. To validate the usefulness of the proposed system, we applied it to a real-world dataset regarding the recommendation for POI (point-of-interests). Providing personalized POI recommendation is getting more attentions as the popularity of the location-based services such as Yelp and Foursquare increases. The dataset was collected from university students via a Web-based online survey system. Using the survey system, we collected the overall ratings as well as the ratings for each criterion for 48 POIs that are located near K university in Seoul, South Korea. The criteria include 'food or taste', 'price' and 'service or mood'. As a result, we obtain 2,878 valid ratings from 112 users. Among 48 items, 38 items (80%) are used as training dataset, and the remaining 10 items (20%) are used as validation dataset. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system (i.e. hybrid selective model), we compared its performance to the performances of two comparison models - the traditional CF and the CF with multicriteria ratings. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using two metrics - average MAE(mean absolute error) and precision-in-top-N. Precision-in-top-N represents the percentage of truly high overall ratings among those that the model predicted would be the N most relevant items for each user. The experimental system was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The experimental results showed that our proposed system (avg. MAE = 0.584) outperformed traditional CF (avg. MAE = 0.591) as well as multicriteria CF (avg. AVE = 0.608). We also found that multicriteria CF showed worse performance compared to traditional CF in our data set, which is contradictory to the results in the most previous studies. This result supports the premise of our study that people have two different types of preference schemes - holistic and composite. Besides MAE, the proposed system outperformed all the comparison models in precision-in-top-3, precision-in-top-5, and precision-in-top-7. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system outperformed traditional CF with 10% statistical significance level, and multicriteria CF with 1% statistical significance level from the perspective of average MAE. The proposed system sheds light on how to understand and utilize user's preference schemes in recommender systems domain.