Alleviating the Cold Start Problem in Recommender Systems Based on Modularity Maximization Community Detection Algorithm

Recommender system (RS) has become a very important factor in many eCommerce sites. In our daily life, we rely on the recommendation from other persons either by word of mouth, recommendation letters, movie, item and book reviews printed in newspapers, etc. The typical Recommender Systems are software tools and techniques that provide support to people by identifying interesting products and services in online store. It also provides a recommendation for certain users who search for the recommendations. The most important open challenge in Collaborative filtering recommender system is the cold start problem. If the adequate or sufficient information is not available for a new item or users, the recommender system runs into the cold start problem. To increase the usefulness of collaborative recommender systems, it could be desirable to eliminate the challenge such as cold start problem. Revealing the community structures is crucial to understand and more important with the increasing popularity of online social networks. The community detection is a key issue in social network analysis in which nodes of the communities are tightly connected each other and loosely connected between other communities. Many algorithms like Givan-Newman algorithm, modularity maximization, leading eigenvector, walk trap, etc., are used to detect the communities in the networks. To test the community division is meaningful we define a quality function called modularity. Modularity is that the links within a community are higher than the expected links in those communities. In this paper, we try to give a solution to the cold-start problem based on community detection algorithm that extracts the community from the social networks and identifies the similar users on that network. Hence, within the proposed work several intrinsic details are taken as a rule of thumb to boost the results higher. Moreover, the simulation experiment was taken to solve the cold start problem.

A Novel Shilling Attack Detection Model Based on Particle Filter and Gravitation

With the rapid development of e-commerce, the security issues of collaborative filtering recommender systems have been widely investigated. Malicious users can benefit from injecting a great quantities of fake profiles into recommender systems to manipulate recommendation results. As one of the most important attack methods in recommender systems, the shilling attack has been paid considerable attention, especially to its model and the way to detect it. Among them, the loose version of Group Shilling Attack Generation Algorithm (GSAGenl) has outstanding performance. It can be immune to some PCC (Pearson Correlation Coefficient)-based detectors due to the nature of anti-Pearson correlation. In order to overcome the vulnerabilities caused by GSAGenl, a gravitation-based detection model (GBDM) is presented, integrated with a sophisticated gravitational detector and a decider. And meanwhile two new basic attributes and a particle filter algorithm are used for tracking prediction. And then, whether an attack occurs can be judged according to the law of universal gravitation in decision-making. The detection performances of GBDM, HHT-SVM, UnRAP, AP-UnRAP Semi-SAD,SVM-TIA and PCA-P are compared and evaluated. And simulation results show the effectiveness and availability of GBDM.

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Integrative Systems Engineering NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere(CASA) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

In conjunction with the NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA),the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst invites applications for a tenure-track position in Integrative Systems Engineering(ISE) at the Assistant Professor level to begin September 2009.

A semi-transparent selective undo algorithm for multi-user collaborative editors

Multi-user collaborative editors are useful computer-aided tools to support human-to-human collaboration.For multi-user collaborative editors,selective undo is an essential utility enabling users to undo any editing operations at any time.Collaborative editors usually adopt operational transformation(OT)to address concurrency and consistency issues.However,it is still a great challenge to design an efficient and correct OT algorithm capable of handling both normal do operations and user-initiated undo operations because these two kinds of operations can interfere with each other in various forms.In this paper,we propose a semi-transparent selective undo algorithm that handles both do and undo in a unified framework,which separates the processing part of do operations from the processing part of undo operations.Formal proofs are provided to prove the proposed algorithm under the well-established criteria.Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation are conducted to show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the prior OT-based selective undo algorithms.

Preference transfer model in collaborative filtering for implicit data

Generally, predicting whether an item will be liked or disliked by active users, and how much an item will be liked, is a main task of collaborative filtering systems or recommender systems. Recently, predicting most likely bought items for a target user, which is a subproblem of the rank problem of collaborative filtering, became an important task in collaborative filtering. Traditionally, the prediction uses the user item co-occurrence data based on users' buying behaviors. However, it is challenging to achieve good prediction performance using traditional methods based on single domain information due to the extreme sparsity of the buying matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel method called the preference transfer model for effective cross-domain collaborative filtering. Based on the preference transfer model, a common basis item-factor matrix and different user-factor matrices are factorized.Each user-factor matrix can be viewed as user preference in terms of browsing behavior or buying behavior. Then,two factor-user matrices can be used to construct a so-called ‘preference dictionary' that can discover in advance the consistent preference of users, from their browsing behaviors to their buying behaviors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed preference transfer model outperforms the other methods on the Alibaba Tmall data set provided by the Alibaba Group.