Enhancing Personalized Recommendation by Transductive Support Vector Machine and Active Learning

Abstract

As an important component of information service networks, personalized recommendation technology provides users with better options and enables them to obtain information anytime and anywhere. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a successful and widely used form of this technology. However, the traditional CF recommendation algorithm is ineffective in environments with frequent entry of new users and high levels of data sparsity. For new users in the system, few or no scores, labels, or other such information is available, leading to the user cold start problem. Simultaneously, data sparsity leads to the selection of unreasonable neighbors, which reduces the recommendation accuracy. In addition, the traditional CF recommendation algorithm ignores the inherent connections between users’ preferences and their basic information (such as demographics). Users with similar demographic information are likely to have similar preferences, which can serve as a good basis for finding neighbors. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a recommendation model that combines active learning (AL) and a semi-supervised transductive support vector machine (TSVM). To enable neighbors to be found quickly and accurately, similar users are clustered together on the basis of their basic information. Then, the TSVM-based classifier is trained on each cluster. To improve the quality of sample labeling and thus the classifier performance, an active learning method based on the distance strategy and a multiclassifier voting mechanism is implemented. Finally, the TSVM-based recommendation model is trained on the labeled samples. The extensive experiments conducted using a real data set from MovieLens demonstrate that the proposed model effectively alleviates the aforementioned cold start and data sparsity problems.