Statistical Methods For Recommender Systems

Designing algorithms to recommend items such as news articles and movies to users is a challenging task in numerous web applications. The crux of the problem is to rank items based on users' responses to different items to optimize for multiple objectives. Major technical challenges are high dimensional prediction with sparse data and constructing high dimensional sequential designs to collect data for user modeling and system design. This comprehensive treatment of the statistical issues that arise in recommender systems includes detailed, in-depth discussions of current state-of-the-art methods such as adaptive sequential designs (multi-armed bandit methods), bilinear random-effects models (matrix factorization) and scalable model fitting using modern computing paradigms like MapReduce. The authors draw upon their vast experience working with such large-scale systems at Yahoo! and LinkedIn, and bridge the gap between theory and practice by illustrating complex concepts with examples from applications they are directly involved with.

This book comprehensively covers the topic of recommender systems, which provide personalized recommendations of products or services to users based on their previous searches or purchases. Recommender system methods have been adapted to diverse applications including query log mining, social networking, news recommendations, and computational advertising. This book synthesizes both fundamental and advanced topics of a research area that has now reached maturity. The chapters of this book are organized into three categories: Algorithms and evaluation: These chapters discuss the fundamental algorithms in recommender systems, including collaborative filtering methods, content-based methods, knowledge-based methods, ensemble-based methods, and evaluation. Recommendations in specific domains and contexts: the context of a recommendation can be viewed as important side information that affects the recommendation goals. Different types of context such as temporal data, spatial data, social data, tagging data, and trustworthiness are explored. Advanced topics and applications: Various robustness aspects of recommender systems, such as shilling systems, attack models, and their defenses are discussed. In addition, recent topics, such as learning to rank, multi-armed bandits, group systems, multi-criteria systems, and active learning systems, are introduced together with applications. Although this book primarily serves as a textbook, it will also appeal to industrial practitioners and researchers due to its focus on applications and references. Numerous examples and exercises have been provided, and a solution manual is available for instructors.

Information providers are a very promising application area of recommender systems due to the general problem of assessing the quality of information products prior to the purchase. Recommender systems automatically generate product recommendations: customers profit from a faster finding of relevant products, stores profit from rising sales. All aspects of recommender systems are covered: the economic background, mechanism design, a survey of systems in the Internet, statistical methods and algorithms, service oriented architectures, user interfaces, as well as experiences and data from real-world applications. Specific solutions for areas with strong privacy concerns, scalability issues for large collections of products, as well as algorithms to lessen the cold-start problem for a faster return on investment of recommender projects are addressed. This book describes all steps it takes to design, implement, and successfully operate a recommender system for a specific information platform.

This second edition of a well-received text, with 20 new chapters, presents a coherent and unified repository of recommender systems’ major concepts, theories, methodologies, trends, and challenges. A variety of real-world applications and detailed case studies are included. In addition to wholesale revision of the existing chapters, this edition includes new topics including: decision making and recommender systems, reciprocal recommender systems, recommender systems in social networks, mobile recommender systems, explanations for recommender systems, music recommender systems, cross-domain recommendations, privacy in recommender systems, and semantic-based recommender systems. This multi-disciplinary handbook involves world-wide experts from diverse fields such as artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, data mining, mathematics, statistics, adaptive user interfaces, decision support systems, psychology, marketing, and consumer behavior. Theoreticians and practitioners from these fields will find this reference to be an invaluable source of ideas, methods and techniques for developing more efficient, cost-effective and accurate recommender systems.

Summary Online recommender systems help users find movies, jobs, restaurants-even romance! There's an art in combining statistics, demographics, and query terms to achieve results that will delight them. Learn to build a recommender system the right way: it can make or break your application! Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Recommender systems are everywhere, helping you find everything from movies to jobs, restaurants to hospitals, even romance. Using behavioral and demographic data, these systems make predictions about what users will be most interested in at a particular time, resulting in high-quality, ordered, personalized suggestions. Recommender systems are practically a necessity for keeping your site content current, useful, and interesting to your visitors. About the Book Practical Recommender Systems explains how recommender systems work and shows how to create and apply them for your site. After covering the basics, you'll see how to collect user data and produce personalized recommendations. You'll learn how to use the most popular recommendation algorithms and see examples of them in action on sites like Amazon and Netflix. Finally, the book covers scaling problems and other issues you'll encounter as your site grows. What's inside How to collect and understand user behavior Collaborative and content-based filtering Machine learning algorithms Real-world examples in Python About the Reader Readers need intermediate programming and database skills. About the Author Kim Falk is an experienced data scientist who works daily with machine learning and recommender systems. Table of Contents PART 1 - GETTING READY FOR RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS What is a recommender? User behavior and how to collect it Monitoring the system Ratings and how to calculate them Non-personalized recommendations The user (and content) who came in from the cold PART 2 - RECOMMENDER ALGORITHMS Finding similarities among users and among content Collaborative filtering in the neighborhood Evaluating and testing your recommender Content-based filtering Finding hidden genres with matrix factorization Taking the best of all algorithms: implementing hybrid recommenders Ranking and learning to rank Future of recommender systems

This comprehensive encyclopedia, in A-Z format, provides easy access to relevant information for those seeking entry into any aspect within the broad field of Machine Learning. Most of the entries in this preeminent work include useful literature references.

Recommender Systems: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach presents a multi-disciplinary approach for the development of recommender systems. It explains different types of pertinent algorithms with their comparative analysis and their role for different applications. This book explains the big data behind recommender systems, the marketing benefits, how to make good decision support systems, the role of machine learning and artificial networks, and the statistical models with two case studies. It shows how to design attack resistant and trust-centric recommender systems for applications dealing with sensitive data. Features of this book: Identifies and describes recommender systems for practical uses Describes how to design, train, and evaluate a recommendation algorithm Explains migration from a recommendation model to a live system with users Describes utilization of the data collected from a recommender system to understand the user preferences Addresses the security aspects and ways to deal with possible attacks to build a robust system This book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in computer science, electronics and communication engineering, mathematical science, and data science.