Contrastive Trajectory Learning for Tour Recommendation

The main objective of Personalized Tour Recommendation (PTR) is to generate a sequence of point-of-interest (POIs) for a particular tourist, according to the user-specific constraints such as duration time, start and end points, the number of attractions planned to visit, and so on. Previous PTR solutions are based on either heuristics for solving the orienteering problem to maximize a global reward with a specified budget or approaches attempting to learn user visiting preferences and transition patterns with the stochastic process or recurrent neural networks. However, existing learning methodologies rely on historical trips to train the model and use the next visited POI as the supervised signal, which may not fully capture the coherence of preferences and thus recommend similar trips to different users, primarily due to the data sparsity problem and long-tailed distribution of POI popularity. This work presents a novel tour recommendation model by distilling knowledge and supervision signals from the trips in a self-supervised manner. We propose Contrastive Trajectory Learning for Tour Recommendation (CTLTR), which utilizes the intrinsic POI dependencies and traveling intent to discover extra knowledge and augments the sparse data via pre-training auxiliary self-supervised objectives. CTLTR provides a principled way to characterize the inherent data correlations while tackling the implicit feedback and weak supervision problems by learning robust representations applicable for tour planning. We introduce a hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder to identify tourists’ intentions and use the contrastive loss to discover subsequence semantics and their sequential patterns through maximizing the mutual information. Additionally, we observe that a data augmentation step as the preliminary of contrastive learning can solve the overfitting issue resulting from data sparsity. We conduct extensive experiments on a range of real-world datasets and demonstrate that our model can significantly improve the recommendation performance over the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both recommendation accuracy and visiting orders.

Graph Co-Attentive Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation aims to generate recommendations merely based on the ongoing session, which is a challenging task. Previous methods mainly focus on modeling the sequential signals or the transition relations between items in the current session using RNNs or GNNs to identify user’s intent for recommendation. Such models generally ignore the dynamic connections between the local and global item transition patterns, although the global information is taken into consideration by exploiting the global-level pair-wise item transitions. Moreover, existing methods that mainly adopt the cross-entropy loss with softmax generally face a serious over-fitting problem, harming the recommendation accuracy. Thus, in this article, we propose a Graph Co-Attentive Recommendation Machine (GCARM) for session-based recommendation. In detail, we first design a Graph Co-Attention Network (GCAT) to consider the dynamic correlations between the local and global neighbors of each node during the information propagation. Then, the item-level dynamic connections between the output of the local and global graphs are modeled to generate the final item representations. After that, we produce the prediction scores and design a Max Cross-Entropy (MCE) loss to prevent over-fitting. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets, i.e., Diginetica, Gowalla, and Yoochoose. The experimental results show that GCARM can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in terms of Recall and MRR, especially on boosting the ranking of the target item.

Multi-interest Diversification for End-to-end Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommenders capture dynamic aspects of users’ interests by modeling sequential behavior. Previous studies on sequential recommendations mostly aim to identify users’ main recent interests to optimize the recommendation accuracy; they often neglect the fact that users display multiple interests over extended periods of time, which could be used to improve the diversity of lists of recommended items. Existing work related to diversified recommendation typically assumes that users’ preferences are static and depend on post-processing the candidate list of recommended items. However, those conditions are not suitable when applied to sequential recommendations. We tackle sequential recommendation as a list generation process and propose a unified approach to take accuracy as well as diversity into consideration, called multi-interest, diversified, sequential recommendation . Particularly, an implicit interest mining module is first used to mine users’ multiple interests, which are reflected in users’ sequential behavior. Then an interest-aware, diversity promoting decoder is designed to produce recommendations that cover those interests. For training, we introduce an interest-aware, diversity promoting loss function that can supervise the model to learn to recommend accurate as well as diversified items. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four public datasets and the results show that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods regarding diversity while producing comparable or better accuracy for sequential recommendation.

Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation for Organ Matching

Reducing the shortage of organ donations to meet the demands of patients on the waiting list has being a major challenge in organ transplantation. Because of the shortage, organ matching decision is the most critical decision to assign the limited viable organs to the most “suitable” patients. Currently, organ matching decisions are only made by matching scores calculated via scoring models, which are built by the first principles. However, these models may disagree with the actual post-transplantation matching performance (e.g., patient's post-transplant quality of life (QoL) or graft failure measurements). In this paper, we formulate the organ matching decision-making as a top-N recommendation problem and propose an Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation (AWTR) method. AWTR improves performance of the current scoring models by using limited actual matching performance in historical datasets as well as the collected covariates from organ donors and patients. AWTR sacrifices the overall recommendation accuracy by emphasizing the recommendation and ranking accuracy for top-N matched patients. The proposed method is validated in a simulation study, where KAS [ 60 ] is used to simulate the organ-patient recommendation response. The results show that our proposed method outperforms seven state-of-the-art top-N recommendation benchmark methods.

Intelligent Recommendation Algorithm of Multimedia English Distance Education Resources Based on User Model

Based on the understanding and comparison of various main recommendation algorithms, this paper focuses on the collaborative filtering algorithm and proposes a collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm with improved user model. Firstly, the algorithm considers the score difference caused by different user scoring habits when expressing preferences and adopts the decoupling normalization method to normalize the user scoring data; secondly, considering the forgetting shift of user interest with time, the forgetting function is used to simulate the forgetting law of score, and the weight of time forgetting is introduced into user score to improve the accuracy of recommendation; finally, the similarity calculation is improved when calculating the nearest neighbor set. Based on the Pearson similarity calculation, the effective weight factor is introduced to obtain a more accurate and reliable nearest neighbor set. The algorithm establishes an offline user model, which makes the algorithm have better recommendation efficiency. Two groups of experiments were designed based on the mean absolute error (MAE). One group of experiments tested the parameters in the algorithm, and the other group of experiments compared the proposed algorithm with other algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance in recommendation accuracy and recommendation efficiency.

Fusion of Internal Similarity to Improve the Accuracy of Recommendation Algorithm

Collaborative filtering algorithms (CF) and mass diffusion (MD) algorithms have been successfully applied to recommender systems for years and can solve the problem of information overload. However, both algorithms suffer from data sparsity, and both tend to recommend popular products, which have poor diversity and are not suitable for real life. In this paper, we propose a user internal similarity-based recommendation algorithm (UISRC). UISRC first calculates the item-item similarity matrix and calculates the average similarity between items purchased by each user as the user’s internal similarity. The internal similarity of users is combined to modify the recommendation score to make score predictions and suggestions. Simulation experiments on RYM and Last.FM datasets, the results show that UISRC can obtain better recommendation accuracy and a variety of recommendations than traditional CF and MD algorithms.

Network Course Recommendation System Based on Double-Layer Attention Mechanism

In view of the lack of accurate recommendation and selection of courses on the network teaching platform in the new form of higher education, a network course recommendation system based on the double-layer attention mechanism is proposed. First of all, the collected data are preprocessed, while the data of students and course information are normalized and classified. Then, the dual attention mechanism is introduced into the parallel neural network recommendation model so as to improve the model’s ability to mine important features. TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) based on the student score and course category is improved. The recommendation results are classified according to the weight of course categories, so as to construct different types of course groups and complete the recommendation. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the model recommendation accuracy compared with other algorithms.

Online Diagnosis-Treatment Department Recommendation based on Machine Learning in China (Preprint)

BACKGROUND As a supplement to the traditional medical service mode, online medical mode provides services of online appointment, online consultation, online remote treatment, etc. Through interactive communications of doctors-patient's Q&As, doctors would have a preliminary diagnosis and then provide patients with services such as telling medical knowledge, making diagnosis, as well as giving diagnosis-treatment advices.Due to the complexity of online medical service application scenarios and the necessity of professional knowledge, the accuracy of the department during patient online consultation is limited, and traditional recommendation methods in the medical field face problems such as low computational efficiency and poor effectiveness Machine learning has been widely and successfully applied in medical fields . Hence, this study applies machine learning technology to intelligent department recommendation for online diagnosis-treatment services, with the purpose of recommending appropriate departments for patients according to the consultation text entered by patients online. OBJECTIVE This paper compares the accuracy rate of different machine learning algorithms utilized for intelligent medical department recommendation at online diagnosis-treatment platforms, aiming to extract new features from the research data to improve recommendation effect. METHODS Based on 57632 pieces of online diagnosis-treatment data from 20 second-level departments at WeDoctor platform, the accuracy rates of two text vectorization methods in implementing intelligent department recommendation pairing with four classifiers, namely support-vector machine, random forest, multinomial Bayes and logistic regression, were compared from the perspective of hierarchy classification of department and secondary department. Furthermore, the paper also introduces variable of gender and age to improve accuracy rate of department recommendation. RESULTS The recommendation accuracy rate is the best when text vectorization method is word2vec and classification algorithm is support-vector machine. The accuracy rate is 79.40% after adding age and gender into the model. The accuracy rate of intelligent recommendation was only about 52.7% for general surgery department and the reason behind is probably that online consultations from patients are usually so complicated that department functions are prone to be confused. CONCLUSIONS The effect of machine learning for online diagnosis-treatment platforms’ intelligent department recommendation is particularly significant. And the recommendation accuracy rate can be further improved by integrating age and gender into the algorithm. Moreover, considering the fact that some disease symptoms are confusing and can affect the recommendation accuracy rate to some extent, multiple departments shall be recommended to improve patients' online diagnosis-treatment experience and satisfaction.

From Users’ Intentions to IF-THEN Rules in the Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things era, users are willing to personalize the joint behavior of their connected entities, i.e., smart devices and online service, by means of trigger-action rules such as “IF the entrance Nest security camera detects a movement, THEN blink the Philips Hue lamp in the kitchen.” Unfortunately, the spread of new supported technologies makes the number of possible combinations between triggers and actions continuously growing, thus motivating the need of assisting users in discovering new rules and functionality, e.g., through recommendation techniques. To this end, we present , a semantic Conversational Search and Recommendation (CSR) system able to suggest pertinent IF-THEN rules that can be easily deployed in different contexts starting from an abstract user’s need. By exploiting a conversational agent, the user can communicate her current personalization intention by specifying a set of functionality at a high level, e.g., to decrease the temperature of a room when she left it. Stemming from this input, implements a semantic recommendation process that takes into account ( a ) the current user’s intention , ( b ) the connected entities owned by the user, and ( c ) the user’s long-term preferences revealed by her profile. If not satisfied with the suggestions, then the user can converse with the system to provide further feedback, i.e., a short-term preference , thus allowing to provide refined recommendations that better align with the original intention. We evaluate by running different offline experiments with simulated users and real-world data. First, we test the recommendation process in different configurations, and we show that recommendation accuracy and similarity with target items increase as the interaction between the algorithm and the user proceeds. Then, we compare with other similar baseline recommender systems. Results are promising and demonstrate the effectiveness of in recommending IF-THEN rules that satisfy the current personalization intention of the user.

Code Edit Recommendation Using a Recurrent Neural Network

When performing software evolution tasks, developers spend a significant amount of time looking for files to modify. By recommending files to modify, a code edit recommendation system reduces the developer’s navigation time when conducting software evolution tasks. In this paper, we propose a code edit recommendation method using a recurrent neural network (CERNN). CERNN forms contexts that maintain the sequence of developers’ interactions to recommend files to edit and stops recommendations when the first recommendation becomes incorrect for the given evolution task. We evaluated our method by comparing it with the state-of-the-art method MI-EA that was developed based on the association rule mining technique. The result shows that our proposed method improves the average recommendation accuracy by approximately 5% over MI-EA (0.64 vs. 0.59 F-score).