In many cases, however, these applications have a strong social component, whose integration in the bandit algorithm could lead to a dramatic performance increase. For instance, content may be served to a group of users by taking advantage of an underlying network of social relationships among them. In this paper, we introduce novel algorithmic approaches to the solution of such networked bandit problems. More specifically, we design and analyze a global recommendation strategy which allocates a bandit algorithm to each network node (user) and allows it to "share" signals (contexts and payoffs) with the neghboring nodes. We then derive two more scalable variants of this strategy based on different ways of clustering the graph nodes. We experimentally compare the algorithm and its variants to state-of-the-art methods for contextual bandits that do not use the relational information. Our experiments, carried out on synthetic and real-world datasets, show a consistent increase in prediction performance obtained by exploiting the network structure.

This paper is concerned with how to make efficient use of social information to improve recommendations. Most existing social recommender systems assume people share similar preferences with their social friends. Which, however, may not hold true due to various motivations of making online friends and dynamics of online social networks. Inspired by recent causal process based recommendations that first model user exposures towards items and then use these exposures to guide rating prediction, we utilize social information to capture user exposures rather than user preferences. We assume that people get information of products from their online friends and they do not have to share similar preferences, which is less restrictive and seems closer to reality. Under this new assumption, in this paper, we present a novel recommendation approach (named SERec) to integrate social exposure into collaborative filtering. We propose two methods to implement SERec, namely social regularization and social boosting, each with different ways to construct social exposures. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art methods on top-N recommendations. Further study compares the robustness and scalability of the two proposed methods.

Personalized tag recommender systems suggest a list of tags to a user when he or she wants to annotate an item. They utilize users’ preferences and the features of items. Tensorfactorization techniques have been widely used in tag recommendation. Given the user-item pair, although the classic PITF (Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization) explicitly models the pairwise interactions among users, items and tags, it overlooks users’ short-term interests and suffers from data sparsity. On the other hand, given the user-item-time triple, time-aware approaches like BLL (Base-Level Learning) utilize the time effect to capture the temporal dynamics and the most popular tags on items to handle cold start situation of new users. However, it works only on individual level and the target resource level, which cannot find users’ potential interests. In this paper, we propose an unified tag recommendation approach by considering both time awareness and personalization aspects, which extends PITF by adding weightsto user-tag interaction and item-tag interaction respectively. Compared to PITF, our proposed model can depict temporal factor by temporal weights and relieve data sparsity problem by referencing the most popular tags on items. Further, our model brings collaborative filtering (CF) to time-aware models, which can mine information from global data and help improving the ability of recommending new tags. Different from the power-form functions used in the existing time aware recommendation models, we use the Hawkes process with the exponential intensity function to improve the model’s efficiency. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state of the art tag recommendation methods in accuracy and has better ability to recommend new tags.

In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded state-of-the-art performance on several tasks. Although some recent works have focused on combining deep learning with recommendation, we highlight three issues of existing works. First, most works perform deep content feature learning and resort to matrix factorization, which cannot effectively model the highly complex user-item interaction function. Second, due to the difficulty on training deep neural networks, existing models utilize a shallow architecture, and thus limit the expressive potential of deep learning. Third, neural network models are easy to overfit on the implicit setting, because negative interactions are not taken into account. To tackle these issues, we present a generic recommender framework called Neural Collaborative Autoencoder (NCAE) to perform collaborative filtering, which works well for both explicit feedback and implicit feedback. NCAE can effectively capture the relationship between interactions via a non-linear matrix factorization process. To optimize the deep architecture of NCAE, we develop a three-stage pre-training mechanism that combines supervised and unsupervised feature learning. Moreover, to prevent overfitting on the implicit setting, we propose an error reweighting module and a sparsity-aware data-augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that NCAE can significantly advance the state-of-the-art.

Multi-armed bandit problems are receiving a great deal of attention because they adequately formalize the exploration-exploitation trade-offs arising in several industrially relevant applications, such as online advertisement and, more generally, recommendation systems. In many cases, however, these applications have a strong social component, whose integration in the bandit algorithm could lead to a dramatic performance increase. For instance, we may want to serve content to a group of users by taking advantage of an underlying network of social relationships among them. In this paper, we introduce novel algorithmic approaches to the solution of such networked bandit problems. More specifically, we design and analyze a global strategy which allocates a bandit algorithm to each network node (user) and allows it to “share” signals (contexts and payoffs) with the neghboring nodes. We then derive two more scalable variants of this strategy based on different ways of clustering the graph nodes. We experimentally compare the algorithm and its variants to state-of-the-art methods for contextual bandits that do not use the relational information. Our experiments, carried out on synthetic and real-world datasets, show a marked increase in prediction performance obtained by exploiting the network structure.

Multi-armed bandit problems are receiving a great deal of attention because they adequately formalize the exploration-exploitation trade-offs arising in several industrially relevant applications, such as online advertisement and, more generally, recommendation systems. In many cases, however, these applications have a strong social component, whose integration in the bandit algorithm could lead to a dramatic performance increase. For instance, we may want to serve content to a group of users by taking advantage of an underlying network of social relationships among them. In this paper, we introduce novel algorithmic approaches to the solution of such networked bandit problems. More specifically, we design and analyze a global strategy which allocates a bandit algorithm to each network node (user) and allows it to "share" signals (contexts and payoffs) with the neghboring nodes. We then derive two more scalable variants of this strategy based on different ways of clustering the graph nodes. We experimentally compare the algorithm and its variants to state-of-the-art methods for contextual bandits that do not use the relational information. Our experiments, carried out on synthetic and real-world datasets, show a marked increase in prediction performance obtained by exploiting the network structure.

We propose a method to predict users’ interests in social media, using time-evolving, multinomial relational data. We exploit various actions performed by users, and their preferences to predict user interests. Actions performed by users in social media such as Twitter, Delicious and Facebook have two fundamental properties. (a) User actions can be represented as high-dimensional or multinomial relations - e.g. referring URLs, bookmarking and tagging, clicking a favorite button on a post etc. (b) User actions are time-varying and user-specific – each user has unique preferences that change over time. Consequently, it is appropriate to represent each user’s action at some point in time as a multinomial relational data. We propose ActionGraph, a novel graph representation for modeling users’ multinomial, time-varying actions. Each user’s action at some time point is represented by an action node. ActionGraph is a bipartite graph whose edges connect an action node to its involving entities, referred to as object nodes. Using real-world social media data, we empirically justify the proposed graph structure. Our experimental results show that the proposed ActionGraph improves the accuracy in a user interest prediction task by outperforming several baselines including standard tensor analysis, a previously proposed state-of-the-art LDA-based method and other graph-based variants. Moreover, the proposed method shows robust performances in the presence of sparse data.

Transfer learning addresses the problems that labeled training data are insufficient to produce a high-performance model. Typically, given a target learning task, most transfer learning approaches require to select one or more auxiliary tasks as sources by the designers. However, how to select the right source data to enable effective knowledge transfer automatically is still an unsolved problem, which limits the applicability of transfer learning. In this paper, we take one step ahead and propose a novel transfer learning framework, known as source-selection-free transfer learning (SSFTL), to free users from the need to select source domains. Instead of asking the users for source and target data pairs, as traditional transfer learning does, SSFTL turns to some online information sources such as World Wide Web or the Wikipedia for help. The source data for transfer learning can be hidden somewhere within this large online information source, but the users do not know where they are. Based on the online information sources, we train a large number of classifiers. Then, given a target task, a bridge is built for labels of the potential source candidates and the target domain data in SSFTL via some large online social media with tag cloud as a label translator. An added advantage of SSFTL is that, unlike many previous transfer learning approaches, which are difficult to scale up to the Web scale, SSFTL is highly scalable and can offset much of the training work to offline stage. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SSFTL through extensive experiments on several real-world datasets in text classification.

More and more users have been taking various actions to diverse resources referred to by URLs such as news, web pages, images, products, movies as a result of the growth of social media. They are annotating, tweeting in Twitter, reblogging in Tumblr, and Liking in Facebook, etc. Analyses about these diverse actions will be useful for aggregating or integrating diverse resources. In this paper, we view users’ actions to resources as expressing their some interests, and by investigating how their interests are expressed in social media, we get suggestions for aggregations. Our results show that a certain kind of action (such as tagging on Delicious) can be used to make predictions on a different kind of action (such as favorite on Twitter). These analyses will be useful for aggregating or integrating diverse contents on multiple sources. In addition to some experimental analyses, we propose a novel method to predict users’ interests in social media, using time-evolving, multinomial relational data. Our experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms standard tensor analysis and an existing state-of-the-art method (LDA) in prediction tasks.

Internet memes are phenomena that rapidly gain popularity or notoriety on the Internet. Often, modifications or spoofs add to the profile of the original idea thus turning it into a phenomenon that transgresses social and cultural boundaries. It is commonly assumed that Internet memes spread virally but scientific evidence as to this assumption is scarce. In this paper, we address this issue and investigate the epidemic dynamics of 150 famous Internet memes. Our analysis is based on time series data that were collected from Google Insights, Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon. We find that differential equation models from mathematical epidemiology as well as simple log-normal distributions give a good account of the growth and decline of memes. We discuss the role of log-normal distributions in modeling Internet phenomena and touch on practical implications of our findings.