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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>August</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Feature Factorization for top-n Recommendation: from item rating to features relevance</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Vito Walter Anelli, Tommaso Di Noia,</string-name>
          <email>tommaso.dinoia@poliba.it</email>
          <email>vitowalter.anelli@poliba.it</email>
          <email>{vitowalter.anelli,tommaso.dinoia,disciascio}@poliba.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Pasquale Lops</string-name>
          <email>pasquale.lops@uniba.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Eugenio Di Sciascio, Polytechnic University of Bari</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Via E. Orabona, 4, Bari</addr-line>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>University of Bari “Aldo Moro”</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Via E. Orabona, 4, Bari</addr-line>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2017</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>27</volume>
      <issue>2017</issue>
      <fpage>16</fpage>
      <lpage>21</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>In the last decade, collaborative ltering approaches have shown their e ectiveness in computing accurate recommendations starting from the user-item matrix. Unfortunately, due to their inner nature, collaborative algorithms work very well with dense matrices but show their limits when they deal with sparse ones. In these cases, encoding user preferences only by means of past ratings may lead to unsatisfactory recommendations. In this paper we propose to exploit past user ratings to evaluate the relevance of every single feature within each pro le thus moving from a user-item to a userfeature matrix. We then use matrix factorization techniques to compute recommendations. The evaluation has been performed on two datasets referring to di erent domains (music and books) and experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the matrix factorization approach performed in the user-item space in terms of accuracy of results.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>INTRODUCTION</title>
      <p>
        Recent years have seen the ourishing of many and diverse
recommendation techniques based on the collaborative information
encoded in the user-rating matrix. Factorization techniques
working in such matrix have proven their e ectiveness in improving
the performance of recommendation engines and are implemented
in many industrial and commercial systems [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref14">1, 14</xref>
        ]. State-of-art
algorithms can capture complex non-linear or latent factors-based
relationships between users and items and this results more e
ective in all those scenarios where several users partially overlap
their ratings or, in other words, the user-rating matrix is less sparse.
In order to overcome the limits of pure collaborative approaches,
hybrid ones [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] have been proposed that encode also side
information about the items, typically content-based. Hybrid recommender
systems have widely proved to improve performances in terms of
accuracy and diversity of results[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref18 ref25 ref29">15, 18, 25, 29</xref>
        ]. Whenever
available, descriptions of the items can be used as a valuable source of
information to augment the knowledge injected in and exploited
by the system to compute the recommendation list of items. In
this direction, an interesting class of recommender systems is the
so called semantics-aware [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] where the information describing
items goes beyond text and keywords and is represented by
categorical/ontological data. SA approaches make use of ontologies or
encyclopedic sources to encode and exploit domain-speci c
knowledge and in the last years many approaches have been proposed
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref19 ref2">2, 17, 19</xref>
        ]. More recently, thanks to the Linking Open Data initiative,
many structured data have become freely available to represent
the content of items in di erent knowledge domains and then feed
recommendation engines [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>As a general remark, we can say that most of the
recommendation algorithms available in the literature focus on computing the
relevance of a set of items with reference to the user pro le.
Recommendation algorithms are designed around the computation of
a relevance score to an item by evaluating its similarity with
reference to other items. Features composing the description of an item,
whatever the source, are not considered per se in the
recommendation process but are usually exploited to evaluate the similarity
between items or users. We believe that more attention should be
paid to modeling the recommendation problem with a focus on
recommending features rather then items. Expanding an item in
its features brings with it some interesting side e ects. On the one
hand, all features may represent relations that, e.g., latent factor
models are not able to look at. On the other hand, features give us a
new set of explicit connections between items to be exploited with
collaborative ltering algorithms. Finally, recommending items via
feature recommendation may lead to an easier generation of
explanation for the recommended list of items. Unfortunately, moving
from items to features is not that straight as in a forest of many
features, most of them may result not relevant to a user. Moreover,
once we design an algorithm able to compute a recommendation list
of features, we have to go back to the items space, as the ultimate
goal of a recommender systems is to suggest items to a user.</p>
      <p>In this paper we present FF (for Features Factorization), a
top-N recommendation algorithm relying on user’s feature
preferences and collaborative ltering information in the features space.
The main goal of FF is to compute an ordered list of features
preferred by the user and, starting from such list, to reassemble the
relevance values of each returned feature to produce a top-N list
of items to recommend. All the side information adopted by FF
is retrieved from DBpedia, the cornerstone dataset of the Linked
Data cloud. For each item in the user pro le we retrieve its
features by querying DBpedia thus having them as a set of entities.
This avoids all problems related to synonymy and polysemy which
usually occur when dealing with keyword-based features. By
combining the popularity of a feature in the user pro le and the ratings
assigned to items it is part of, for each user we compute a pair
containing the relevance of the feature and its inferred rating. The
resulting matrix in the user-feature space is then manipulated via
factorization techniques to compute, for each user, a ranked list of
features which is in turn post-processed to produce the nal list of
recommendations. Experimental evaluations of FF on two datasets
related to the domains of books and music show its e ectiveness
in terms of accuracy of results in very sparse settings.</p>
      <p>The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In the next
section we report some related work on LOD-based and
featurebased approaches to recommendation. We continue in Section 3
by introducing and describing FF. Experimental evaluations are
presented in Section 4 while in Section 5 we present and discuss
the corresponding results. Conclusion and future works close the
paper.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>RELATED WORK</title>
      <p>Several works have tried to build recommender systems by
exploiting Linked Open Data (LOD) as side information for representing
users or items, in addition to the user preferences usually collected
through user ratings. Such approaches usually rely on DBpedia, the
nucleus which acts as a hub for most of the knowledge in the
socalled LOD cloud. In the following we review the recent literature
on both LOD-based recommender systems and approaches which
leverage the relevance of single features in the user pro le.</p>
      <p>
        LOD-based RS. A detailed review of recommender systems
leveraging Linked Open Data is presented in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]. Properties
gathered from DBpedia may be used for di erent tasks, i.e. to produce
cross-domain recommendations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ], to build a multirelational
graph for a graph-based recommender [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
        ], or to generate e
ective natural-language recommendation explanations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ]. On the
other hand, DBpedia properties may be used in di erent ways: 1)
to de ne semantic similarity measures for providing more accurate
recommendations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18 ref23 ref30">18, 23, 30</xref>
        ]; 2) to deal with problems as the
limited content analysis or cold-start, e.g. by introducing new relevant
features to improve item representations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3 ref33">3, 33</xref>
        ], or to cope with the
increasing data sparsity [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]; 3) to improve the overall accuracy of
a recommender [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20 ref29">20, 29</xref>
        ], or to provide a good balance between
different recommendation objectives, such as accuracy and diversity
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref21 ref28">15, 21, 28</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Feature-based RS. Several works attempt to analyze the user
purchasing behavior based on item features. In [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref35">35</xref>
        ], products are
represented using vectors of features, and a customer pro le module
computes the level of interest of the customer in product features
as the ratio of features among the products purchased, and the
product quantity purchased by that customer. Similarly, in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ] a
feature-based recommender system for domains without enough
historical data to e ectively measure user or item similarities is
presented. The authors build the system based on the idea that
users who bought items with speci c features also buy items with the
same or similar features. A similar approach is proposed in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ], in
which e ective strategies to incorporate item features for top-N
recommender systems are developed. In graph-based recommender
systems, an interesting work was proposed in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ], in which
recommendations are produced inferring user preferences, evaluating
item-preferences and attribute-preferences. The paper points out
the importance of the feature evaluation and a method is proposed,
which exploits explicit feature ratings, named attributes. Recently,
an interesting approach called Feature Preferences Matrix
Factorization (FPMF) has been proposed in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ]. FPMF incorporates user
feature preferences in a matrix factorization to predict user likes. It
is worth to note that none of the previous mentioned approaches
rely on features coming from the Linked Open Data cloud.
3
3.1
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>PROPOSED APPROACH</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Motivation</title>
      <p>This work aims at investigating the role of feature rating and
relevance in the item rating process. The main intuition behind
FF is that items can be handled as a collection of features on which
the recommendation process is then performed. Hence, when users
rate an item, they are actually expressing their preference over the
whole collection. The item rating action can be then summarized as
the non trivial attempt to choose an overall rate for the entire set.
If we want to discover the contribution of each single feature in the
evaluation, rst of all, we need to unpack each item in its composing
features. Then, by combining the overall popularity of each feature
in the user pro le (feature relevance) and the rating assigned to
items containing that feature we may estimate the implicit rating
the user is giving to that speci c feature. In the evaluation of a
movie, the user implicitly evaluates the director, the actors, the
producer, the country in which the movie is set. Each feature has its
own rating and a relevance degree, hence a recommender system
should consider these factors.</p>
      <p>The second observation we based our work on, is that the
relevance of an item in the user pro le cannot be entirely encoded in
its rating as the single rating represents a degree of liking about
the speci c item. The relevance of the item within a collection is
not explicitly encoded anywhere with reference to the user’s view.
Our assumption is that such item-relevance naturally in uences
feature-relevances and vice-versa.</p>
      <p>In our model the user pro le is not just a set of hitem; ratingi
pairs but it contains information about the relevance of each feature
composing the rated items and its estimated rating hf eature; relevance; ratingi.
In the following we will see principled methods to estimate both the
user-feature rating and the user-feature relevance. Then, we focus
the recommendation problem on the features composing the user
pro le. FF exploits a collaborative ltering step to get approximated
information about the missing features in the users-features matrix
and nally it combines the predicted ratings and relevance for each
feature available in each item to compute a personalized ranked
list of items.
3.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Data Model</title>
      <p>For a better understanding of the data we use to reshape the user
pro le as user-feature matrices, we rst introduce the
multidimensional graph we used to build them. As we can see from Figure 1
the user pro le is built by considering information coming from
both the user-item matrix and from DBpedia as external
knowledge source. The graph-based nature of this latter one is exploited
to identify features used to represent items. The knowledge
encoded in Linked Data is represented as RDF labeled oriented graphs
and the corresponding data model is based on the notion of triple
hsubject ; predicate; object i where predicate represents the relation
connecting the two entities subject and object . With reference to
Figure 1, we have that each item in the catalog represents the
subject of a triple hi; p; ei 2 DBpedia. In order to catch the di
erent knowledge encoded in the use of the same entity as object in
triples with diverse predicates, in our model, we consider the chain
predicate object , (corresponding to property entity, pe path in
the knowledge graph) as a feature associated to the item i which in
turn represents the subject of the corresponding triple.</p>
      <p>Each item in the user pro le is associated with a relevance
function we denote with ρui ( ). Its value represents an estimation of
how important is a particular item to the user u. Analogously, we
have a value associated to each feature in the pro le computed via
the function ρuf ( ) computing the relevance of the feature f
(represented by the pair of property and entity pe) in the user pro le.
Actually, each feature is associated also with a rating ruf ( ) which
is inferred by considering the rating of all the items containing f .
By considering the data associated to the user pro le as described
in the previous section we can move from a rating matrix
connecting user and items to a user-feature matrix where each value is
represented by the pair hρuf ( ); ruf ( )i. In other words, we may
consider two user-feature matrices: the one P containing relevance
values ρuf ( ), the other R including the inferred ratings ruf ( ).</p>
      <p>In FF, the relevance of a feature pe is computed as its probability
of belonging to the set Iu representing the items already rated by a
user u. More formally we have:
ρuf (pe ) =</p>
      <p>Pi 2Iu jfhi; p; ei j hi; p; ei 2 DBpediagj
jIu j</p>
      <p>The idea behind this computation is quite straight: the more a
feature is connected to the items in the user pro le , the higher its
relevance for the user.</p>
      <p>Once we have computed the relevance of all the features in the
user pro le, we can move to the computation of the relevance for the
items i 2 Iu . This can be computed as the normalized summation
of the relevance for all the features it is composed by. In formulas,
we have
ρui (i ) =</p>
      <sec id="sec-5-1">
        <title>Phi;p;ei2DBpedia ρuf (pe )</title>
        <p>jfhi; p; ei j hi; p; ei 2 DBpediagj
Given a feature pe, the computation of the feature rating ruf (pe )
exploits both the rating and the relevance of each item i 2 Iu
containing pe.</p>
        <p>ruf (pe ) =</p>
        <p>Phi;p;ei2DBpedia rui ρui (i )</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-5-2">
        <title>Phi;p;ei2DBpedia ρui (i )</title>
        <p>(1)
3.4</p>
        <p>
          top-N Recommendation
The pro les we built contain only the features the user met before,
but usually the number of those features is dramatically smaller
than the overall number of features and this results in P and R
being very sparse. In order to complete the information they contain,
we compute, via Biased Matrix Factorization, the missing values
ρˆuf (pe ) for P and rˆuf (pe ) for R. We run matrix factorization
independently on P and R. Biased Matrix Factorization is a matrix
factorization model that minimizes RMSE using stochastic gradient
descent [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
          ]. It computes user’s and item’s biases to improve the
estimation of the predicted value. Biased Matrix Factorization
represents a state-of-the-art algorithm in rating prediction task. ρˆuf (pe )
and rˆuf (pe ) represent the predicted relevance and the predicted
rating for all those features not belonging to any of the items in Iu .
As the resulting matrices contain both content-based and
collaborative informations (due to the matrix factorization), we refer to
them as hybrid pro le.
        </p>
        <p>With the hybrid pro le we can estimate a ranked list for all the
remaining items within the collection. In fact, the ranking of an
item in the list is computed by considering the rating of the features
belonging to the item and their relevance.</p>
        <p>3.4.1 Post-filtering. In order to improve the results of the nal
recommendation process, we propose a post- ltering step aimed
at reducing the number of features considered while computing
the nal rank. The proposes ltering springs from the following
observations:
Not all the features items are relevant in the computation
of the ranking for an item. All those features whose
rating results low just introduce noise in the nal values we
compute.</p>
        <p>Feature ranking and relevance values evaluated via pure
content-based approaches, i.e., before the matrix
factorization, have a di erent in uence if compared with the
collaborative ones representing latent factors computed
after the matrix factorization.</p>
        <p>In order to lower the number of features involved in the
computation and produce recommendations based only on the best ratings
of the estimated features, we propose a lter that operates
separately on directly estimated features (content-based) and estimated
features coming from collaborative computation. We then
introduce two thresholds α and β that act as lters on the feature rating
values respectively in the content-based and in the collaborative
cases. Hence, Equation (2) is slightly modi ed in</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION</title>
      <p>
        In this section the experimental evaluation settings and the
metrics used to evaluate the proposed algorithm are presented. We
evaluated the algorithms in terms of ranking accuracy for top-N
recommendations. The evaluation has been carried out on two
datasets, LibraryThing and Last.fm belonging respectively to the
domains of books and music. In order to remove the popularity
bias from the evaluation results we removed the 1% most popular
items [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Moreover we removed users with a number of ratings
smaller than ve as we want to evaluate the algorithms in a non
cold start setting. The LibraryThing dataset contains 7,564 users,
39,515 items and 797,299 ratings. The minimum, mean and
maximum number of ratings for user in the dataset are 20, 63, 3,018,
respectively. Last.fm contains 1,892 users, 17,632 items and 92,834
ratings. In LibraryThing, ratings are distributed over a 1-10 scale.
In Last.fm the rating is the number of times a song has been played,
hence that number has been rescaled for each user in a 1-10 scale.
Table 1 shows some statistics of the datasets subsets considering
only the items mapped to DBpedia (using publicly available
mappings [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
        ]) after the pre-processing step. In case a mapping does
not exist, a simple placeholder feature is used, that inherits the
corresponding item values in terms of rating and relevance.
      </p>
      <p>Table 1 also reports the sparsity values both for users-items and
users-features matrices.</p>
      <p>
        To evaluate FF we use the all unrated items [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref34">34</xref>
        ] evaluation
protocol, in which the ability to choose the correct set of items to propose
to the users is favorite despite of the local ranking ability (rated
testitems evaluation protocol). In all unrated items the recommendation
list is produced using as candidate list the Cartesian product
between users and item minus the items the user experimented in the
training set. The evaluation has been conducted using a hold-out
80-20 splitting, in which 20% of the ratings are retained as test set.
      </p>
      <p>LibraryThing
user-item space
user-feature space</p>
      <p>Last.fm
user-item space
user-feature space
# users
1,866
# users
1,866
# items
8,502
# features
274,523
# ratings
39,557
# ratings
4,989,281
sparsity (%)</p>
      <p>99.7157
sparsity (%)
99.11226
sparsity (%)
99.75066
sparsity (%)
99.02603</p>
      <p>We evaluated the accuracy of our approach by computing Precision
(P @N ), Recall (R@N ) and nDCG (nDCG@N ). Besides, as test-set
could contain non-relevant documents, i.e. a low rated item we set
a simple threshold in the 1 to 10 rating scale thus considering as
relevant only the items that fall above it.</p>
      <p>
        Baselines. In the experimental evaluation we compared FF with
the popularity baseline (PopRank) and, as we rely on matrix
factorization, the well known matrix factorization algorithm BPRMF
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref32">32</xref>
        ] both in its pure collaborative version and in the hybrid one
considering side information BPRMF+SI. We included also PopRank
as it is acknowledged that popularity ranking can show good
performance and it is an important baseline to compare against [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ].
In order to produce recommendation lists from these well-known
algorithms we used their MyMediaLite1 implementation [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ]. As
for the selection of α and β parameters needed in Equation (3), in
these experiments we kept a conservative approach and set
respectively α to the mean μ of the rated items and β to the mean μ plus
the standard deviation σ . Clearly, these values are not the optimal
ones and the performances could be improved by a cross-validation
setting of these parameters.
5
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS</title>
      <p>10 recommendation list and relevance threshold of 7/10.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>CONCLUSION</title>
      <p>
        In this paper we presented FF, a novel algorithm that bases on
feature recommendation as an intermediate step for computing top-N
items recommendation lists. The main idea behind FF is that feature
relevance in a user pro le plays a key role in the selection and rating
of an item in a collection. Based on this observation we developed
an algorithm that shifts the recommendation problem from a
useritem space to a user-feature one. In this new space we introduced
the explicit notion of feature relevance and feature rating and
combined them with well known factorization techniques to perform
a Features Factorization aimed at predicting a rating and a
relevance for each feature unknown to the user. We compared FF
with well known factorization techniques (both pure collaborative
and hybrid with side information) on two datasets in the domains
of books and music. In both datasets FF results the best algorithm
in terms of recommending accurate items. This can be considered
as a strong clue to con rm our intuition that recommending items
via feature ranking is a feasible way to develop content-aware
recommendation engines. As future work, we are investigating the
behavior of FF with respect to novelty and diversity of results. We
are also interested in exploring the behavior of FF approach with
di erent collaborative ltering algorithms, other than factorization
techniques in the item-feature space and in particular with
Factorization Machines [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref31">31</xref>
        ]. Moreover, since we collected content-based
data from Linked Open Data datasets, an analysis on the in uence
of such datasets on the recommendation results is also in progress.
Another aspect we are willing to deepen is related to results
explanation. Indeed, very interestingly, item recommendation via feature
ranking paves the way to new proposals for explanation services.
      </p>
    </sec>
  </body>
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          (
          <year>2016</year>
          ),
          <fpage>63</fpage>
          -
          <lpage>93</lpage>
          .
        </mixed-citation>
      </ref>
    </ref-list>
  </back>
</article>