Using Taste Groups for Collaborative Filtering

Implicit feedback is the simplest form of user feedback that can be used for item recommendation. It is easy to collect and domain independent. However, there is a lack of negative examples. Existing works circumvent this problem by making various assumptions regarding the unconsumed items, which fail to hold when the user did not consume an item because she was unaware of it. In this paper, we propose as a novel method for addressing the lack of negative examples in implicit feedback. The motivation is that if there is a large group of users who share the same taste and none of them consumed an item, then it is highly likely that the item is irrelevant to this taste. We use Hierarchical Latent Tree Analysis(HLTA) to identify taste-based user groups and make recommendations for a user based on her memberships in the groups.

Matrix Factorization Equals Efficient Co-occurrence Representation

Matrix factorization is a simple and effective solution to the recommendation problem. It has been extensively employed in the industry and has attracted much attention from the academia. However, it is unclear what the low-dimensional matrices represent. We show that matrix factorization can actually be seen as simultaneously calculating the eigenvectors of the user-user and item-item sample co-occurrence matrices. We then use insights from random matrix theory (RMT) to show that picking the top eigenvectors corresponds to removing sampling noise from user/item co-occurrence matrices. Therefore, the low-dimension matrices represent a reduced noise user and item co-occurrence space. We also analyze the structure of the top eigenvector and show that it corresponds to global effects and removing it results in less popular items being recommended. This increases the diversity of the items recommended without affecting the accuracy.

Sparse Boltzmann Machines with Structure Learning as Applied to Text Analysis

We are interested in exploring the possibility and benefits of structure learning for deep models. As the first step, this paper investigates the matter for Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). We conduct the study with Replicated Softmax, a variant of RBMs for unsupervised text analysis. We present a method for learning what we call Sparse Boltzmann Machines, where each hidden unit is connected to a subset of the visible units instead of all of them. Empirical results show that the method yields models with significantly improved model fit and interpretability as compared with RBMs where each hidden unit is connected to all visible units.

Building Sparse Deep Feedforward Networks using Tree Receptive Fields

Sparse connectivity is an important factor behind the success of convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning sparse connectivity for feedforward neural networks (FNNs). The key idea is that a unit should be connected to a small number of units at the next level below that are strongly correlated. We use Chow-Liu's algorithm to learn a tree-structured probabilistic model for the units at the current level, use the tree to identify subsets of units that are strongly correlated, and introduce a new unit with receptive field over the subsets. The procedure is repeated on the new units to build multiple layers of hidden units. The resulting model is called a TRF-net. Empirical results show that, when compared to dense FNNs, TRF-net achieves better or comparable classification performance with much fewer parameters and sparser structures. They are also more interpretable.

Learning Hierarchical Item Categories from Implicit Feedback Data for Efficient Recommendations and Browsing

Searching, browsing, and recommendations are common ways in which the "choice overload" faced by users in the online marketplace can be mitigated. In this paper we propose the use of hierarchical item categories, obtained from implicit feedback data, to enable efficient browsing and recommendations. We present a method of creating hierarchical item categories from implicit feedback data only i.e., without any other information on the items like name, genre etc. Categories created in this fashion are based on users' co-consumption of items. Thus, they can be more useful for users in finding interesting and relevant items while they are browsing through the hierarchy. We also show that this item hierarchy can be useful in making category based recommendations, which makes the recommendations more explainable and increases the diversity of the recommendations without compromising much on the accuracy. Item hierarchy can also be useful in the creation of an automatic item taxonomy skeleton by bypassing manual labeling and annotation. This can especially be useful for small vendors. Our data-driven hierarchical categories are based on hierarchical latent tree analysis (HLTA) which has been previously used for text analysis. We present a scaled up learning algorithm \emph{HLTA-Forest} so that HLTA can be applied to implicit feedback data.

Learning Sparse Deep Feedforward Networks via Tree Skeleton Expansion

Despite the popularity of deep learning, structure learning for deep models remains a relatively under-explored area. In contrast, structure learning has been studied extensively for probabilistic graphical models (PGMs). In particular, an efficient algorithm has been developed for learning a class of tree-structured PGMs called hierarchical latent tree models (HLTMs), where there is a layer of observed variables at the bottom and multiple layers of latent variables on top. In this paper, we propose a simple method for learning the structures of feedforward neural networks (FNNs) based on HLTMs. The idea is to expand the connections in the tree skeletons from HLTMs and to use the resulting structures for FNNs. An important characteristic of FNN structures learned this way is that they are sparse. We present extensive empirical results to show that, compared with standard FNNs tuned-manually, sparse FNNs learned by our method achieve better or comparable classification performance with much fewer parameters. They are also more interpretable.

Latent Tree Variational Autoencoder for Joint Representation Learning and Multidimensional Clustering

Recently, deep learning based clustering methods are shown superior to traditional ones by jointly conducting representation learning and clustering. These methods rely on the assumptions that the number of clusters is known, and that there is one single partition over the data and all attributes define that partition. However, in real-world applications, prior knowledge of the number of clusters is usually unavailable and there are multiple ways to partition the data based on subsets of attributes. To resolve the issues, we propose latent tree variational autoencoder (LTVAE), which simultaneously performs representation learning and multidimensional clustering. LTVAE learns latent embeddings from data, discovers multi-facet clustering structures based on subsets of latent features, and automatically determines the number of clusters in each facet. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance and reals reasonable multifacet structures of the data.

Document Generation with Hierarchical Latent Tree Models

In most probabilistic topic models, a document is viewed as a collection of tokens and each token is a variable whose values are all the words in a vocabulary. One exception is hierarchical latent tree models (HLTMs), where a document is viewed as a binary vector over the vocabulary and each word is regarded as a binary variable. The use of word variables allows the detection and representation of patterns of word co-occurrences and co-occurrences of those patterns qualitatively using multiple levels of latent variables, and naturally leads to a method for hierarchical topic detection. In this paper, we assume that an HLTM has been learned from binary data and we extend it to take word frequencies into consideration. The idea is to replace each binary word variable with a real-valued variable that represents the relative frequency of the word in a document. A document generation process is proposed and an algorithm is given for estimating the model parameters by inverting the generation process. Empirical results show that our method significantly outperforms the commonly-used LDA-based methods for hierarchical topic detection, in terms of model quality and meaningfulness of topics and topic hierarchies.

Conformative Filtering for Implicit Feedback Data

Implicit feedback is the simplest form of user feedback that can be used for item recommendation. It is easy to collect and domain independent. However, there is a lack of negative examples. Existing works circumvent this problem by making various assumptions regarding the unconsumed items, which fail to hold when the user did not consume an item because she was unaware of it. In this paper we propose Conformative Filtering (CoF) as a novel method for addressing the lack of negative examples in implicit feedback. The motivation is that if there is a large group of users who share the same taste and none of them consumed an item, then it is highly likely that the item is irrelevant to this taste. We use Hierarchical Latent Tree Analysis (HLTA) to identify taste-based user groups, and make recommendations for a user based on her memberships in the groups. Experiments on real-world datasets from different domains show that CoF has superior performance compared to other baselines and more than 10% improvement in Recall@5 and Recall@10 is observed.

Latent Tree Models for Hierarchical Topic Detection

We present a novel method for hierarchical topic detection where topics are obtained by clustering documents in multiple ways. Specifically, we model document collections using a class of graphical models called hierarchical latent tree models (HLTMs). The variables at the bottom level of an HLTM are observed binary variables that represent the presence/absence of words in a document. The variables at other levels are binary latent variables, with those at the lowest latent level representing word co-occurrence patterns and those at higher levels representing co-occurrence of patterns at the level below. Each latent variable gives a soft partition of the documents, and document clusters in the partitions are interpreted as topics. Latent variables at high levels of the hierarchy capture long-range word co-occurrence patterns and hence give thematically more general topics, while those at low levels of the hierarchy capture short-range word co-occurrence patterns and give thematically more specific topics. Unlike LDA-based topic models, HLTMs do not refer to a document generation process and use word variables instead of token variables. They use a tree structure to model the relationships between topics and words, which is conducive to the discovery of meaningful topics and topic hierarchies.