Two major classes
- Content based
- Collaborative filtering
- Latent factor based
Discussion on "Long Tail" effect. Some products (less popular) may mot exists in physical stores because it's not reasonable to stock them.
Formal model:
C - set of Customers
S - set of Items
Utility function u: C x S -> R (set of Ratings)
R - totally ordered
Key problems:
- Gathering "known" ratings for matrix
- Explicit (ask people, don't scale)
- Implicit (learn from actions, hard to learn low ratings)
- Extrapolate unknown ratings from the known ones (mostly interested in high unknown ratings)
- Sparsity
- Cold start: new items have no ratings, new users have no history
- Evaluating extrapolation methods
Content-based recommendations
Main idea to recommend customer x items similar to previous items highly recommended by customer x
Item profiles - set of "important" features
Text features - set of "important" words
Extract using heuristics like TF-IDF (Term frequency * Inverse Doc Frequency)
f_{ij} - frequency of ter (feature)
i in doc (item)
j
TF_{ij}= f_{ij}/{max_kf_{ij}}
n_j - number of docs that mention term
i
N- total number of docs
IDF_i=log(N/n_i)
TF-IDF score:
w_{ij}=TF_{ij} xx IDF_i
Doc profile - set of words with highest TF-IDF scores (together with scores)
I.e. word is frequent in (small) set of document - it's important
Steps include building user profile as sort of aggregated features of items and estimate
U(x,i)=cos(theta)=(x*i)/(|x||i|) where x is User profile, i Item profile. Aggregation can be mean or normalized mean of features of items.
Pros:
- No need for data on other users
- Able to recommend to users with unique tastes
- Able to recommend new & unpopular items
- Explanation for recommended items
Cons:
- Hard to find appropriate features
- Overspecialization - never recommend items outside user's profile, unable to exploit quality judgments of other users
- Cold start problem - how to build user profile
Collaborative filtering
Main idea to find N other users whose rating is similar to x's rating and estimate x's rating based on ratings of users in N
Similarity between users
- Jaccard similarity sim(A,B)=|r_A nn r_B|/|r_A uu r_B| doesn't work well.
- sim(A,B)= cos ( r_A, r_B )
- Centered cosine is better sim(A,B)= cos ( r_A, r_B ) - center user's rating around average value.( Make 0 average user's rating)
Rating Predictions
Let
r_x be the vector of user x's ratings
Let N be the set of k users most similar to x
who also rated item i
Prediction for user x and item i:
Option 1:
r_{:x i:} = 1/k sum _{:y in N:}r_{:yi:} - doesn't take in account "degree of similarity" of users
Option 2:
r_{:x i:} = 1/k sum _{:y in N:}s_{:xy:}r_{:yi:} // sum _{:y in N:}s_{:xy:} where
s_{:xy:} = sim(x,y)
Another version is Item-Item filtering (User-User described right above)
- For item i find other similar items
- Estimate rating for item i based on ratings for similar items
- Can use same similarity metrics and prediction functions as in user-user model
r_{:x i:} = {sum _{:j in N (i;x):}s_{:ij:}r_{:xj:}} / {sum _{:j in N(i;x):}s_{:ij:}} where
s_{:ij:} similarity of items i and j
r_{:xj:} rating of user x on item
N(i;x) set items rated by x similar to i
In practice item-item outperforms user-user in many use cases. - Items are "simpler" than users. Items similarity is more meaningful than user similarity
Common practice implementing collaborative filtering - some combination of recommendation system plus filtering
r_{:x i:} = b_{:x i:}+{sum _{:j in N (i;x):}s_{:ij:}(r_{:xj:}-b_{:xj:})} / {sum _{:j in N(i;x):}s_{:ij:}} where
b_{:x i:} = mu + b_x + b_i,
mu - overall mean movie rating (example of movie database),
b_x - rating deviation of user x = (avg rating of user x) -
mu,
b_i - rating deviation of movie i
Evaluating Recommender system
Predict ratings on test set and evaluate RMSE
sqrt({sum_{(x,i) in T}(r_{x i} - r_{x i}^**)^2} / N)
N=|T|,
r_{x I} the predicted rating,
r_{x i}^** the actual rating.
Problem with RMSE - Prediction Diversity (all predictions too similar to each other), Prediction Context (user might operate in different context => want different results), Order of Prediction
We care only to predict high ratings - RMSE might penalize method that does well for high ratings and badly with others, Alternative : precision at top k i.e. percentage of prediction in user's top k ratings.
Latent Factor Models
Global effects => like Baseline Estimation
Local neighborhood (CF/NN) => Final estimate
Collaborative filtering - derive unknown rating from k-nearest neighbors like
hat r_{x i} = (sum_{j in N(i;x)}S_{ij}*r_{xj})/(sum_{j in N(i;x)}S_{ij})
s_{ij} similarity of items i and j
r_{uj} rating of user x on item j
N(i;x) set of items similar to item i that were rated by x
Combine with global effects
hat r_{x i} = b_{x i} + (sum_{j in N(i;x)}S_{ij}*(r_{xj}-b_{x j}))/(sum_{j in N(i;x)}S_{ij})
b_{x i}=mu+b_x + b_i
mu - overall mean rating
b_x - rating deviation of user x
b_i - rating deviation of item i
Problems:
1) Similarity are arbitrary
2) Pairwise similarities neglect interdependencies among users
3) Taking weighted average can be restricting
SVD
A - input data matrix
U - left singular vec
V - right singular vec
Sigma - singular values
A~~U Sigma V^T => "SVD"
R~~Q*P^T, A=R, Q=U,
P^T=Sigma V^T
R - utility matrix approximated by Q and P matrices of lower dimensions
SVS minimizes reconstruction error
SSE = {::}_{U,V,Sigma}^"min" sum_{i,j in A}(A_{ij}-[U Sigma V^T]_{ij})^2
SSE - Sum of Squared Errors
SSE and MSE are monotonically related
RMSE = 1/{const} sqrt(SSE) => also minimizing RMSE
But R has missing entries!
So modify SVD to find P,Q such as
{::}_{P,Q}^"min" sum_{(i,x in R)}(r_{"xi"}-q_i * p_x^T)^2 (use elements with defined scores)
also
- we don't require P,Q to be orthogonal/unit length
- P,Q map users/movies to latent space
We want a large k, but if k>2 SSE on training data will increase, because model will adapt noise. So we may use regularization like
{::}_{P,Q}^"min" sum_{(i,x in R)}(r_{"xi"}-q_i * p_x^T)^2+ lambda[ sum_x||p_x||^2+sum_i||q_i||^2]
and use gradient descent
Initialize P and Q (using SVD - pretend missed ratings are 0)
Do gradient descent
- P larr P - eta * gradP
- Q larr Q - eta * gradQ
where
gradQ = [gradq_{ik}] and
gradq_{ik}=sum_"xi"-2(r_"xi"-q_ip_x^T)p_"xk"+2lambdaq_"ik"and similary for
gradP
Modeling biases and interactions
hat r_"xi" = mu + b_x + b_i + q_i*p_x^T
where
'mu' - overall mean rating
b_x - bias for user x
b_i - bias for movie i
q_i*p_x^T - user movie interaction
and we can fit a new model
{::}_{P,Q}^"min" sum_{(i,x in R)}(r_{"xi"}- (mu + b_x + b_i + q_i*p_x^T))^2 + lambda[ sum_x||p_x||^2+sum_i||q_i||^2+sum_x||b_x||^2+sum_i||b_i||^2]
where
b_u and
b_i become additional parameters for the estimation
Dimensionality Reduction
Matrix rank - number of lineary independent columns/rows. The amount of coordinates can be reduced to rank.
Why reduce?
- Discover hidden correlation/topics
- Remove redundant and noisy features
- Interpretation and visualization
- Easier storage and processing of data
SVD definition
A_[m x n] = U_[m x r] Sigma_[r x r] (V_[n x r])^T
A: input matrix (say, m documents, n terms)
U: Left singular martix m x n matrix (say, m documents, r concepts)
Sigma Singular values, r x r diagonal matrix, values on diagonal sorted in decreasing order ("strength of each concept")
V: Right singular vector n x r matrix ( n terms, r concepts)
A~~USigmaV^T = sum_isigma_iu_inu_i^T
Decomposition is always possible, matrices are unique, U and V columns orthonormal (
U^TU=I,
V^TV=I, columns are orthogonal unit vectors),
Sigma diagonal, singular values are positive and sorted in decreasing order
We can remove minor (tail
nu).
Frobenius norm is minimal
||M||_F=sqrt(Sigma_"ij"M_"ij^2")
SVD gives best low rank approximation
Rule-of-a thumb - Keep 80-90% of 'energy' (
=sumsigma_i^2)
SVD complexity O(nm^2) or O(n^2m)whichever is less but less work if we just nee a singular values, or k first singular vectors, or the matrix is sparse
Query SVD
q_"concept"= q V - transform query q to "concept" space and it will give a matrix of "strength" of each concept
Relation to Eigen-decomposition
A=XLambdaX^T
- A is symmetric
- U,V,X are orthonormal (U^TU=I)
- Lambda, Sigma are diagonal
or diagonal matrix
lambda_i=sigma_i^2
So
+ Optimal low rank approximation
- Interpretability problem
- Lack of sparsity (singular vectors are dense)
CUR decomposition
Goal - express A as product of C,U,R matrices and keep
||A - C*U*R||_F small
"Constraints" on U - contains set of columns from A, similarly on R - set of rows from A
In practice we can choose about 4K rows/cols and do almost as good as SVD does.
See book for details.
Pros:
Easy interpretation
Sparcity
Cons:
Rows and columns with large norm may be choosen few times (probabilistic method)
P.S.
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