=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1885/210 |storemode=property |title=On the Optimal Setting of Spreading Activation Parameters to Calculate Recommendations on the Knowledge Graph |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1885/210.pdf |volume=Vol-1885 |authors=László Grad-Gyenge |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/itat/Grad-Gyenge17 }} ==On the Optimal Setting of Spreading Activation Parameters to Calculate Recommendations on the Knowledge Graph== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1885/210.pdf
J. Hlaváčová (Ed.): ITAT 2017 Proceedings, pp. 210–217
CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol. 1885, ISSN 1613-0073, c 2017 L. Grad-Gyenge



           On the Optimal Setting of Spreading Activation Parameters to Calculate
                       Recommendations on the Knowledge Graph

                                                          László Grad-Gyenge

                                             Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
                                                laszlo.grad-gyenge@inf.elte.hu,
                                          WWW home page: http://laszlo.grad-gyenge.com

      Abstract: This paper presents the analysis on the optimal       Although the optimal parameter settings of the method
      settings of the spreading parameters of the spreading acti-     should have been further investigated. In order to fill this
      vation technique. The method is applied on the knowledge        gap, this paper presents the results of our numerical exper-
      graph, an information representation technique that com-        iments conducted to identify the optimal values for the re-
      bines collaborative and content-based information. The          lax parameters of the technique. Our results show that the
      evaluation of the recommendation technique is based on          method delivers a stable performance regarding the dif-
      recommendation lists. The involved measures are preci-          ferent parameter settings. The quality of the recommen-
      sion, recall and normalized discounted cumulative gain.         dations calculated by the method become low if the relax
      The numerical experiments are conducted on the Movie-           parameters are set to extreme values.
      Lens 1M dataset. The evaluation results show that spread-          The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
      ing activation delivers a stable performance regarding to       discusses the work related to graph based information rep-
      the evaluation measures over different parameter settings.      resentation and the application of spreading activation as a
      The quality of the recommendations degrade in the case,         recommendation technique. Section 3 presents the repre-
      the method parameters are set to extreme values.                sentation technique and the dataset the method is evaluated
                                                                      on. Section 4 describes the recommendation technique.
                                                                      Section 5 discusses the evaluation technique and presents
      1 Introduction
                                                                      the evaluation results. Section 6 concludes the paper and
      As discussed in detail by Grad-Gyenge et al. [1], in con-       gives insight into our plans for the future.
      trast to the paradigm of user preference, the paradigm of
      relatedness provides a more general and effective approach
      to the design and development of the recommendation al-         2 Related Work
      gorithms. The essence of the paradigm is to focus on the
      relations between the entities of the recommendation sce-       Next to matrix factorization methods [3][4][5], the graph
      nario instead of involving models emphasizing the user          based information representation technique has proven
      item interactions. The primary outcome of the applica-          its effectiveness. Several research projects utilize the
      tion of the paradigm is the potential to involve transitivity   general information representation capability of heteroge-
      into the recommendation techniques. Transitivity is one         neous graphs.
      possibility to define the relation between the users and the       As the state of the art results of the research on recom-
      recommended items in a more general way.                        mender systems illustrate, the application of graph based
         The application of spreading activation in the field of      information representation techniques gaining attention
      recommender systems is an illustrative example of the uti-      nowadays. Graphs are powerful tools of knowledge repre-
      lization of the paradigm. The method is applied on the          sentation. An example of the involvement of a hybridiza-
      knowledge graph [2], which is a general information rep-        tion technique at the information representation level, Lee
      resentation technique. The entities of the recommendation       at al. [6] introcude a heterogeneous graph based technique
      scenario and also the relatations between them are gen-         to combine collaborative and content based information.
      eralized. The users, items and their attribute values are       Further investigating the topic, Lee et al. [7] analyse the
      representated with nodes. User preferences on items and         correlations of the entities found in the graph. As the work
      content based information are represented with edges. The       presented by Tiroshi et al. [8] illustrate, the graph based
      transitive relation in this case means the possibilty to in-    representation is straightforward technique in the case of
      volve paths of heterogeneous types between two nodes.           modeling social relations.
      The advantage of the paradigm is that it does not restrict         In addition to ontologies, the involvement of social net-
      the type of the individual edges on the path between two        works into the recommendation process is an intensively
      nodes, thus the relations between the entities can be treated   researched field. Typically, there are two classes of the
      as generalized and transitive.                                  approaches modeling social networks, the asymmetric and
         The past research on the evaluation of spreading acti-       the symmetric case. The asymmetric case can be described
      vation to generate recommendations showed its potential.        as the follow and the trust relationships. The symmetric
On the Optimal Setting of Spreading Activation Parameters to Calculate Recommendations on the Knowledge Graph                             211

     case can be described as the friendship relationship. Influ-      3    Dataset
     encing results conducted on trust networks are published
     by Guha et al. [9], Massa et al. [10], Ziegler et al. [11],       3.1 Representation Technique
     and Jøsang et al. [12]. Important works calculating recom-
     mendations with the help of the social network are pub-           To represent the data, a graph based technique described
     lished by Guy et al. [13], Konstas et al. [14], and He et         by Grad-Gyenge et al [2] is involved. The advantage of
     al. [15]. The layered graph technique is a typical repre-         this method is its ability to represent various information
     sentation method found in the early works in this field.          sources by alloying both collaborative and content based
     Kazienko et al. [16] also derive recommendations with the         information. The essence of the method is to represent
     help of this technique. Cantador et al. [17] present a clus-      the information in a labeled, heterogeneous graph. Each
     tering technique based method on the layered graph based          user and each item is represented with a dedicated node.
     representation.                                                   The explicit or implicit interaction between the users and
                                                                       the items are modeled with relations annotated by the spe-
                                                                       cific type of the interaction. In addition, the content-based
                                                                       information, namely the user and the item attributes are
        An important feature of the knowledge graph is its ca-         represented with the so-called attribute value nodes. In
     pability to represent heterogeneous information. Proba-           this case, a dedicated node is created for each attribute
     bly, this is the reason why the technique is intensively re-      value. The node representing the user or item is bound to
     searched as the more the involved information sources are,        the specific attribute value node indicating then the partic-
     the less the cold start cases occur. Hu et al. [18] gener-        ular attribute value. This representation technique leads to
     ate leads with a label propagation technique. Catherine           a knowledge graph containing heterogeneous information
     et al. [19] introduce a probabilistic logic method to cal-        at the informaiton representation level.
     culate recommendations with the help of the knowledge                The information is represented in a labeled, undirected,
     graph. Yu et al. [20] investigate the observed and the po-        weighted graph. The definition of the graph is extended
     tential paths of the knowledge graph. To have a numerical         with labels, thus types can be assigned to the nodes and
     measure, they involve the PathSim measure for path com-           edges of the graph. Although parallel edges are allowed,
     parison. Kouki et al. [21] describe a hybridization tech-         in practical applications it is recommended to add only one
     nique with the help of a probabilistic framework. Burke et        edge per type between two specific nodes in order to re-
     al. [22] present a recommendation technique based on the          duce the computational complexity. Equation 1 presents
     k-Nearest Neighbours method applied to various matrices           the definition of the knowledge graph.
     as the user-tag matrix, user-resource matrix, resource-tag
     matrix and the resource-user matrix.
                                                                                       K = (Tn , Te , N, E,tn ,te , re ),          (1)
                                                                       where Tn stands for the node types, Te stands for the edge
                                                                       types. N stands for the nodes of the graph. E ⊆ {{u, v}|u ∈
        The spreading activation technique was originally ap-
                                                                       N ∧ v ∈ N ∧ u 6= v} stands for the set of edges, thus the
     plied to ontologies and is recently involved in different
                                                                       graph is undirected. The function tn ⊂ N × Tn specifies the
     domains to derive recommendations. The primary goal
                                                                       type of the nodes. The function te ⊂ E × Te specifies the
     of Hussein et al. is to close the gap between context-
                                                                       type of the edges. The function re ⊂ Eu × R specific the
     awareness and self-adaptation [23]. To perform this task,
                                                                       rating value of the appropriate edges. The function re does
     SPREADR, a spreading activation based recommendation
                                                                       not assign rating to all edges of the graph, thus re is partial.
     method is defined. Gao et al. [24] propose an ontology
     based approach to model both user interests and items in
     the same knowledge base. Jiang et al. [25] define a user          3.2 MovieLens
     model with the help of an ontology and calculate rec-
     ommendations with the help of the spreading activation.           To analyse the performance of the various method config-
     Blanco-Fernandez et al. [26] argue that spreading activa-         urations, the MovieLens 1M dataset is involved [30]. The
     tion is to be involved to avoid overspecialisation. They          advantage of the MovieLens 1M dataset over the other
     present a semantic model of the preferences of the users          published MovieLens dataset is that in addition to user
     and apply spreading activation to proceed content based           preferences on items it also contains user and item at-
     reasoning. Codina et al. [27] define an item score based          tributes. This allows us to utilize both the collaborative
     on the weighted average of concepts related to each other         and content-based information to come to a lower cold
     in their model. In their work, they estimate user ratings         start rate than the pure collaborative filtering technique
     with a semantic recommendation technique treating it a            has.
     reasoning method. Troussov et al. [28] investigate decay             To give an insight into the information representation
     configurations over a tag aware representation. Alvarez et        technique, Figure 1 presents a detailed part of the knowl-
     al. [29] introduce ONTOSPREAD in the field of medical             edge graph in the case of the MovieLens 1M dataset. To
     systems.                                                          illustrate the different information source types, the nodes
212                                                                                                                       L. Grad-Gyenge

                                                                     technique. For each attribute value, a node of the appro-
                                                                     priate type is created and bound to the item with a corre-
                                                                     sponding edge. The node types introduced in this expri-
                                                                     ment are as follows.

                                                                       • Type YearOfRelease annotates the years of release.

                                                                       • Type Genre annotates the genres. In the case of the
                                                                         MovieLens 1M dataset, multiple genres can be as-
                                                                         signed to a movie. It means the a node representing
                                                                         an item can be connected to multiple nodes represent-
                                                                         ing a genre.

      Figure 1: A detailed view of the MovieLens dataset repre-         The item attribute values are bound to the items with
      sented in the knowledge graph.                                 edges of the corresponding type. The edge types defined
                                                                     are ItemGenre and ItemYearOfRelease, respectively.
                                                                        The advantage of the MovieLens 1M dataset is that
      and the relations are coloured to show the type of informa-    it contains both collaborative and content-based informa-
      tion they represent.                                           tion. The content-based information is described above.
         Colour light blue annotates the items to recommend,         The collaborative information in this case is basically
      i.e., Jaws, Forrest Gump and Chasing Amy. Colour               the 1 000 209 known user rating events contained in the
      light brown annotates the movie genres, i.e., Romance and      dataset. Each rating event consists of a user, an item, a
      Drama. Colour orange annotates the release year of a           preference value and a time-stamp. The preference values
      movie, i.e., 1997. Colour lilac annotates the users, i.e.,     are in the [1, 5] interval. In the current experiment, a lin-
      Person 1, Person 2 and Person 3. Colour grey an-               ear normalization is conducted on this value to the [0.2, 1]
      notates the gender of a person, i.e., Male. Colour blue        interval.
      annotates the occupation of a person, i.e., Scientist.            In order to represent the known rating in the dataset, the
      Colour green annotates the ZIP region of a person, i.e.,       edge type ItemRating is introduced. Adding a known
      ZIP region 2. Colour red annotates the age category,           rating to the knowledge graph means the creation of the
      i.e., 25-34.                                                   edge of the appropriate type (ItemRating) between the
         In order to represent the users of the recommendation       particular user and item. The concrete value of the rating
      screnario, a node with the appropriate type (User) is cre-     is assigned to the particular edge by the re partial function.
      ated in the knowledge graph. The user attribute values are        Table 1 presents the amount of information contained
      represented with the attribute node technique. For each at-    in the knowledge graph in two subtables. Table 1a and
      tribute value, a node of the appropriate type is created and   Table 1b contain the amount of nodes and edges per type,
      bound to the user with a corresponding edge. The node          respectively. The knowledge graph contains 10 062 nodes
      types introduced in this expriment are as follows.             in total. Not counting the edges of type ItemRating, the
                                                                     knowledge graph contains 34 451 edges in total.
        • Type Gender annotates the genders of the users.

        • Type AgeCategory annotates the age categories.             4 Recommendation Technique
        • Type Occupation annotates the occupations.
                                                                     According to Grad-Gyenge et al. [1], the application of
        • Type ZipCodeRegion annotates the ZIP code re-              spreading activation on the knowledge graph described in
          gions. The ZIP code region is derived from the ZIP         Section 3.1 to estimate user preferences on items leads to
          code by using only its first digit representing the U.S.   high quality recommendations. As described in several
          region.                                                    works in the past [29, 28, 24, 26, 25, 23, 27], spreading
                                                                     activation is an iterative technique to calculate a similarity
         The user attribute values are bound to the users            between a source node and the other nodes of a particular
      with edges of the corresponding type.            The edge      graph. As already discussed by Grad-Gyenge et. al [1],
      types defined are PersonGender, PersonAgeCategory,             the advantage of the method is that the similarity value
      PersonOccupation and PersonZipCodeRegion, re-                  incorporates both the distance between two nodes and the
      spectively.                                                    parallel paths in between.
         Analogously to the user attribute values, the items are        As already mentioned, spreading activation is an itera-
      represented with a dedicated node of the appropriate type      tive method. In this experiment, similarly to Grad-Gyenge
      (Item) is created in the knowledge graph. The item at-         et al. [1], the iteration is conducted until a pre-specified
      tribute values are also represented with the attribute node    iteration step (c) limit is reached. The method assigns
On the Optimal Setting of Spreading Activation Parameters to Calculate Recommendations on the Knowledge Graph                          213

     Table 1: Count of node and edge types in the MovieLens            5 Evaluation
     dataset.
                                                                       5.1 Evaluation Technique
                        (a) Count of node types.
                                                                       The methods are evaluated with an iterative process as also
                        Node type         Count
                                                                       described by Grad-Gyenge et al. [2]. Before starting the
                        Person            6 040
                        AgeCategory           7
                                                                       iteration, all the user preference information is removed
                        Gender                2                        from the knowledge graph, thus it contains no edges rep-
                        Occupation           21                        resenting ratings. In the initial step, the knowledge graph
                        ZipCodeRegion        10                        is filled with content-based information, meaning that it
                        Item              3 883                        contains the nodes representing the users, items and their
                        Genre                18                        attribute values. The relations between users and user at-
                        YearOfRelease        81                        tribute values, items and item attributes values are also
                                                                       present in the knowledge base.
                        (b) Count of edge types.                          Having the knowledge base initialized, the evaluation
                   Edge type                    Count                  process is basically an iteration over the known rating val-
                   PersonAgeCategory             6 040                 ues. This iteration is conducted in an ascending order by
                   PersonGender                  6 040                 the timestamp of the known rating. It also means that the
                   PersonOccupation              6 040                 knowledge graph is filled with collaborative information
                   PersonZipCodeRegion           6 040                 during the evaluation process. Each iteration step consist
                   ItemGenre                     6 408                 of the following operations.
                   ItemYearOfRelease             3 883
                   ItemRating                1 000 209                   1. Generate recommendations with the evaluated
                                                                            method.
                                                                         2. Record the evaluation measures.
     activation values to the nodes of the graph as defined in
                                                                         3. Add the known rating to the knowledge graph.
     Equation 2.
                                                                          The advantage of this evaluation method is that in the
                             a(i) ⊂ N × R,                      (2)    beginning the methods are analysed in a cold start environ-
                                                                       ment. As the knowledge based is being filled with collab-
     where a denotes the activation function.
                                                                       orative information, the analsys tends to be conducted in
        In the initial step of the iteration, the activation of the
                                                                       an information dense environment. According to our past
     source node is set to 1 (a(0) (ns ) = 1). The source node (ns )
                                                                       experiments [1, 2], in order to represent the problem, the
     represents the user the recommendations are generated for.
                                                                       experiments are to be conducted on the first 10 000 known
     The activation of all the other nodes are set to 0 (a(0) (n) =
                                                                       ratings. This is the amount of information, the perfor-
     0, n ∈ N, n 6= ns ).
                                                                       mance indicators of the methods typically stabilize, thus
        In each iteration step, the activation of the nodes is
                                                                       the methods can be interpreted.
     maintained. A part of the activation of each node is prop-
                                                                          The analysis of the spreading parameters is basically a
     agated to its neighbour nodes and a part of the activation
                                                                       greedy search method. All the combinations of the rs and
     of each node is being kept at the node. The distribution of
                                                                       the ra parameters are evaluated in the interval [0, 1]. The
     the propagated activation values is conducted based on the
                                                                       fidelity of the analysis is 0.1. The experiment covers all
     weight of the edges. In our case the graph is not weighted,
                                                                       possible combinations of the parameter values and does
     in other words, the edges are weighted basically equally.
                                                                       not restrict to the rs + ra = 1 cases.
     In order to control the propagation process, two param-
                                                                          To evaluate the methods, the precision, recall and the
     eters are introduced. The parameter spreading relax (rs )
                                                                       nDCG measure is recorded at each evaluation step for a
     controls the amount of the distributed activation. The pa-
                                                                       concrete method configuration. The recorded measure val-
     rameter activation relax (ra ) controls the amount of acti-
                                                                       ues are then averaged and are presented. The measures are
     vation kept at each node. The function to maintain the
                                                                       calculated on the first 10 items of the list of recommended
     activation of the nodes is defined in Equation (3).
                                                                       items. The relevance of an item is defined as follows. If
                                              a(i) (m)                 the known rating value of a specific item is 4 or 5 then the
               a(i+1) (n) = ra a(i) (n) + rs ∑         ,        (3)    item is treated relevant. In other words, relevance is de-
                                          m∈Mn |Mn |
                                                                       fined as the threshold 0.8 on the normalized rating value.
     where n ∈ N, i ≥ 0. Mn stands for the neighbour nodes of
     n. Mn = {m|{m, n} ∈ E}.                                           5.2 Evaluation Results
        Having the iteration step count (c) reached, the prefer-
     ence value of each node regarding the source node is de-          Figure 2 contains the results of the evaulation in three sub-
     fined as the value of the activation function.                    figures. Subfigure 2a, 2b and 2c presents the precision,
214                                                                                                                                     L. Grad-Gyenge

      recall and nDCG of the methods, respectively. On each                      be generated as due to the setting of the parameter the ac-
      figure, the horizontal axis represents the setting of the ac-              tivation can not spread from the source node to neighbour-
      tivation relax (ra ) parameter, the vertical axis represents               ing nodes, thus the evaluation measures of these cases are
      the setting of the spreading relax (rs ) parameter. The color              0. This presentation allows us to investigate the evaluation
      of each cell represents the average value of the respective                measures more refined.
      evaluation measure as also indicated in the legend of the                     The figures show that the low values of ra lead to a de-
      figure.                                                                    crease in the recommendation quality. Especially if the
                                                                                 setting of rs is high. Taking a closer look, it can be read
                                       Mean of Precision                         from the figures that the difference in the quality occurs
                                                                                 from the second or the third digit depending on the con-
                         1.00
                                                                                 crete evaluation measure. It means that although the qual-
                                                                                 ity of the recommendations may decrease in some cases
            Spreading Relax




                         0.75                                                    but the method shows a quite stable performance on this
                                                                                 dataset. The reason behind this stabily can be found in its
                                                                         0.650
                         0.50
                                                                         0.625
                                                                         0.600
                                                                                 network science background. We assume that the fact that
                                                                         0.575   the method operates on the network is more important than
                                                                                 its actual configuration.
                         0.25
                                                                                    Table 2 presents the result of the evaluation in numbers
                                                                                 in its subtables. Subtable 2a, 2b and 2c presents the preci-
                                0.00    0.25     0.50    0.75    1.00
                                                                                 sion, recall and nDCG values respectively. The columns of
                                         Activation Relax                        the table represent different activation relax (ra ) parameter
                                               (a) Precision                     settings. The rows of the table represent different spread-
                                                                                 ing relax (rs ) parameter settings. The value of each table
                                        Mean of Recall                           cell contain the actual value of the appropriate evaluation
                         1.00                                                    measure.
                                                                                    The results give a deeper insight into the performance
                                                                                 of the methods than the figure based presentation. The ta-
            Spreading Relax




                         0.75
                                                                                 ble shows that setting the rs to zero leads to unproducible
                                                                         0.072
                                                                         0.068   recommendation lists. Regarding precision and recall, the
                         0.50                                            0.064
                                                                         0.060   highest recommendation quality can be achieved by set-
                                                                                 ting rs to 0.1 and setting ra to higher than 0.5. It means that
                         0.25                                                    in the case of precision and recall, low spreading and high
                                                                                 activation values lead to higher performance. Looking at
                                                                                 nDCG, the configurations leading to the highets quality for
                                0.00    0.25     0.50
                                         Activation Relax
                                                         0.75    1.00            (rs , ra ) are (0.4, 0.3) and (0.5, 0.4). In this case a less ex-
                                                                                 treme and a more common setting of the parameters can
                                                (b) Recall                       be adequate.
                                         Mean of nDCG                               At the macro level, the numerical presentation of the
                         1.00                                                    values shows a consistent view to the figure based repre-
                                                                                 sentation. The results show that the extreme setting of the
                                                                                 method configuration parameters (rs =0) leads to a signifi-
            Spreading Relax




                         0.75
                                                                                 cant decrease in the recommendation quality. In addition,
                                                                          0.90
                                                                                 setting ra to a low value while setting rs to a high value is
                         0.50                                             0.88   not recommended.
                                                                          0.86
                                                                                    To summarize the results, in the case there is no re-
                         0.25
                                                                                 search capacity available to analyise the optimal setting
                                                                                 of the spreading parameters, a good practice can be to set
                                                                                 these parameters to a moderate value, e.g., to the mean of
                                0.00    0.25      0.50    0.75    1.00           the value interval.
                                          Activation Relax

                                                (c) nDGC
                                                                                 6    Conclusion
      Figure 2. Evaluation measures at different spreading parameter settings.
                                                                                 The paper discusses the analysis of the configuration of the
         In order to easier interpret the results visually, the fig-             spreading activation method. The technique is applied on
      ures do not present the evaluation measures resulted in the                the knowledge graph to generate recommendations. Pa-
      rs = 0 case. This is the case when no recommendation can                   rameters spreading and activation relax are investigated
On the Optimal Setting of Spreading Activation Parameters to Calculate Recommendations on the Knowledge Graph                                    215




                          Table 2. The evaluation measures of the method configuration over various spreading parameter settings.

                                                                      (a) Precision.

         S/A        0.0         0.1         0.2         0.3          0.4         0.5         0.6         0.7          0.8         0.9        1
          1.0    0.5592      0.5922      0.6326      0.6495       0.6568      0.6616      0.6655      0.6669       0.6697      0.6716   0.6718
          0.9    0.5592      0.5981      0.6370      0.6530       0.6594      0.6642      0.6664      0.6693       0.6715      0.6718   0.6719
          0.8    0.5592      0.6042      0.6426      0.6558       0.6616      0.6661      0.6685      0.6714       0.6718      0.6719   0.6723
          0.7    0.5592      0.6117      0.6476      0.6585       0.6647      0.6673      0.6710      0.6718       0.6720      0.6723   0.6726
          0.6    0.5592      0.6210      0.6530      0.6616       0.6664      0.6706      0.6718      0.6721       0.6725      0.6726   0.6728
          0.5    0.5592      0.6326      0.6568      0.6655       0.6697      0.6718      0.6722      0.6726       0.6727      0.6729   0.6732
          0.4    0.5592      0.6426      0.6616      0.6685       0.6718      0.6723      0.6726      0.6729       0.6732      0.6734   0.6734
          0.3    0.5592      0.6530      0.6664      0.6718       0.6725      0.6728      0.6732      0.6733       0.6733      0.6734   0.6735
          0.2    0.5592      0.6616      0.6718      0.6726       0.6732      0.6734      0.6734      0.6735       0.6735      0.6736   0.6736
          0.1    0.5592      0.6718      0.6732      0.6734       0.6735      0.6736      0.6737      0.6737       0.6737      0.6737   0.6737
          0.0    0.0000      0.0000      0.0000      0.0000       0.0000      0.0000      0.0000      0.0000       0.0000      0.0000   0.0000
                                                                       (b) Recall.

         S/A        0.0         0.1         0.2         0.3          0.4         0.5         0.6         0.7          0.8         0.9        1
          1.0    0.0574      0.0632      0.0693      0.0712       0.0719      0.0723      0.0726      0.0727       0.0729      0.0730   0.0730
          0.9    0.0574      0.0641      0.0698      0.0716       0.0721      0.0725      0.0727      0.0728       0.0730      0.0730   0.0730
          0.8    0.0574      0.0650      0.0705      0.0718       0.0723      0.0726      0.0728      0.0730       0.0730      0.0730   0.0730
          0.7    0.0574      0.0663      0.0710      0.0721       0.0725      0.0727      0.0729      0.0730       0.0730      0.0731   0.0731
          0.6    0.0574      0.0678      0.0716      0.0723       0.0727      0.0729      0.0730      0.0730       0.0731      0.0731   0.0731
          0.5    0.0574      0.0693      0.0719      0.0726       0.0729      0.0730      0.0730      0.0731       0.0731      0.0731   0.0731
          0.4    0.0574      0.0705      0.0723      0.0728       0.0730      0.0730      0.0731      0.0731       0.0731      0.0731   0.0731
          0.3    0.0574      0.0716      0.0727      0.0730       0.0731      0.0731      0.0731      0.0731       0.0731      0.0731   0.0731
          0.2    0.0574      0.0723      0.0730      0.0731       0.0731      0.0731      0.0731      0.0731       0.0731      0.0731   0.0731
          0.1    0.0574      0.0730      0.0731      0.0731       0.0731      0.0731      0.0732      0.0732       0.0732      0.0732   0.0732
          0.0    0.0000      0.0000      0.0000      0.0000       0.0000      0.0000      0.0000      0.0000       0.0000      0.0000   0.0000

                                                                       (c) nDCG.

         S/A        0.0         0.1         0.2         0.3          0.4         0.5         0.6         0.7          0.8         0.9        1
          1.0    0.8508      0.8694      0.8897      0.9008       0.9075      0.9124      0.9145      0.9166       0.9168      0.9166   0.9165
          0.9    0.8508      0.8717      0.8927      0.9040       0.9099      0.9134      0.9162      0.9169       0.9166      0.9165   0.9165
          0.8    0.8508      0.8743      0.8960      0.9065       0.9124      0.9154      0.9168      0.9167       0.9165      0.9165   0.9163
          0.7    0.8508      0.8785      0.9003      0.9087       0.9140      0.9165      0.9167      0.9165       0.9164      0.9163   0.9163
          0.6    0.8508      0.8843      0.9040      0.9124       0.9162      0.9167      0.9165      0.9164       0.9163      0.9163   0.9162
          0.5    0.8508      0.8897      0.9075      0.9145       0.9168      0.9165      0.9164      0.9163       0.9162      0.9162   0.9161
          0.4    0.8508      0.8960      0.9124      0.9168       0.9165      0.9163      0.9163      0.9162       0.9161      0.9161   0.9161
          0.3    0.8508      0.9040      0.9162      0.9165       0.9163      0.9162      0.9161      0.9160       0.9161      0.9161   0.9160
          0.2    0.8508      0.9124      0.9165      0.9163       0.9161      0.9161      0.9161      0.9160       0.9160      0.9160   0.9160
          0.1    0.8508      0.9165      0.9161      0.9161       0.9160      0.9160      0.9160      0.9159       0.9159      0.9159   0.9159
          0.0    0.0000      0.0000      0.0000      0.0000       0.0000      0.0000      0.0000      0.0000       0.0000      0.0000   0.0000
216                                                                                                                              L. Grad-Gyenge

      via an exhaustive search over the parameter space with the          [6] S. Lee, S. Park, M. Kahng, and S. goo Lee, “PathRank:
      fidelity of 0.1 in the interval [0, 1] × [0, 1]. Evaluation mea-        Ranking nodes on a heterogeneous graph for flexible hybrid
      sures precision, recall and nDCG are recorded during the                recommender systems.” Expert Syst. Appl., no. 2, pp. 684–
      evaluation on the first 10 000 known ratings values. The                697.
      results are presented both graphically and numerically.             [7] K. Lee and K. Lee, “Escaping your comfort zone: A graph-
          The primary finding of the numerical experiments is that            based recommender system for finding novel recommenda-
      the quality of the recommendations decreases in the case                tions among relevant items.” Expert Syst. Appl., no. 10, pp.
                                                                              4851–4858.
      of setting the activation relax (ra ) parameter to a low value
      (close to 0). The quality stays low especially if the set-          [8] A. Tiroshi, S. Berkovsky, M. A. Kâafar, D. Vallet, and
                                                                              T. Kuflik, “Graph-Based Recommendations: Make the
      ting of the spreading relax (rs ) is set to a high value (close
                                                                              Most Out of Social Data.” in UMAP, ser. Lecture Notes
      to 1). In addition, the method is not able to calculate rec-
                                                                              in Computer Science, V. Dimitrova, T. Kuflik, D. Chin,
      ommendations if the spreading relax (rs ) parameter is set              F. Ricci, P. Dolog, and G.-J. Houben, Eds. Springer, pp.
      to 0.                                                                   447–458.
          To be more exact, not counting the rs = 0 case, spread-         [9] R. Guha, R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, and A. Tomkins, “Prop-
      ing activation shows a stable performance. Depending on                 agation of trust and distrust,” in WWW ’04: Proceedings
      the evaluation measure, the quality of the recommenda-                  of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web.
      tions changes numerically only from the second or the                   New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2004, pp. 403–412.
      third digit. We assume that the reason behind this issue           [10] P. Massa and P. Avesani, “Trust-Aware Collaborative Filter-
      can be found in the theoretical foundations of the tech-                ing for Recommender Systems.” in CoopIS/DOA/ODBASE
      nique. Spreading activation is a typical example of the                 (1), ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, R. Meersman
      paradigm of relatedness, which paradigm generalizes the                 and Z. Tari, Eds., vol. 3290. Springer, 2004, pp. 492–508.
      connections between the entities and emphasizes the net-           [11] C.-N. Ziegler and G. Lausen, “Propagation Models for
      work like behaviour of the graph. It also means that the                Trust and Distrust in Social Networks,” Information Sys-
      method strongly relies on the structure of the graph, thus              tems Frontiers, vol. 7, no. 4-5, pp. 337–358, Dec. 2005.
      it involves also network science. We would conculde that           [12] A. Jøsang, S. Marsh, and S. Pope, “Exploring Different
      the presence or involvement of the network leads to a sta-              Types of Trust Propagation.” in iTrust, ser. Lecture Notes in
      ble calculation mechanism which is less sensitive to the                Computer Science, K. Stølen, W. H. Winsborough, F. Mar-
      actual setting of the parameters.                                       tinelli, and F. Massacci, Eds., vol. 3986. Springer, 2006,
                                                                              pp. 179–192.
          Our plans for the future is to analyse the stability of rec-
      ommendation spreading as introduced by Grad-Gyenge et              [13] I. Guy et al., “Personalized recommendation of social soft-
                                                                              ware items based on social relations.” in RecSys, L. D.
      al. [2]. Another important direction is the temporal influ-
                                                                              Bergman, A. Tuzhilin, R. D. Burke, A. Felfernig, and
      ence as a still open question in the case of the graph based            L. Schmidt-Thieme, Eds. ACM, pp. 53–60.
      techniques as also investigated by Dojchinovski et al. [31].
                                                                         [14] I. Konstas, V. Stathopoulos, and J. M. Jose, “On Social Net-
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