Face à la surabondance des ressources et de l'information sur le net, l'accès aux ressources pertinentes devient une tâche fastidieuse pour les usagers de la toile. Les systèmes de recommandation personnalisée comptent parmi les principales solutions qui assistent l'utilisateur en filtrant les ressources, pour ne lui proposer que celles susceptibles de l’intéresser. L’approche basée sur l’observation du comportement de l’utilisateur à partir de ses interactions avec le e-services est appelée analyse des usages. Le filtrage collaboratif et le filtrage basé sur le contenu sont les principales techniques de recommandations personnalisées. Le filtrage collaboratif exploite uniquement les données issues de l’analyse des usages alors que le filtrage basé sur le contenu utilise en plus les données décrivant le contenu des ressources. Un système de recommandation hybride combine les deux techniques de recommandation. L'objectif de cette thèse est de proposer une nouvelle technique d'hybridation en étudiant les bénéfices de l'exploitation combinée d'une part, des informations sémantiques des ressources à recommander, avec d'autre part, le filtrage collaboratif. Plusieurs approches ont été proposées pour l'apprentissage d'un nouveau profil utilisateur inférant ses préférences pour l’information sémantique décrivant les ressources. Pour chaque approche proposée, nous traitons le problème du manque de la densité des données et le problème du passage à l’échelle. Nous montrons également, de façon empirique, un gain au niveau de la précision des recommandations par rapport à des approches purement collaboratives ou purement basées sur le contenu / Face to the ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet, user requires help to access to items that may interest her or him. A personalized recommender system filters relevant items from huge catalogue to particular user by observing his or her behavior. The approach based on observing user behavior from his interactions with the website is called usage analysis. Collaborative Filtering and Content-Based filtering are the most widely used techniques in personalized recommender system. Collaborative filtering uses only data from usage analysis to build user profile, while content-based filtering relies in addition on semantic information of items. Hybrid approach is another important technique, which combines collaborative and content-based methods to provide recommendations. The aim of this thesis is to present a new hybridization approach that takes into account the semantic information of items to enhance collaborative recommendations. Several approaches have been proposed for learning a new user profile inferring preferences for semantic information describing items. For each proposed approach, we address the sparsity and the scalability problems. We prove also, empirically, an improvement in recommendations accuracy against collaborative filtering and content-based filtering

"Recommender systems are being widely applied in many E-commerce sites to suggest products, services, and information items to potential users. Collabora-tive filtering systems, the most successful recommender system technology to date, help people make choices based on the opinions of other people. While collaborative filtering systems have been a substantial success, there are sev-eral problems that researchers and commercial applications have identified: the early rater problem, the sparsity problem, and the large scale problem. Moreover, existing collaborative filtering systems do not consider data re-cency. For this reason, if a user's preferences have changed over time, the sys-tems might not recognize it quickly. This thesis studies how to apply data re-cency to collaborative filtering systems to get more predictive accuracy. We define the data recency problem as the negative impact of old data on the pre-dictive accuracy of collaborative filtering systems. In order to mitigate this shortcoming, the combinations of time-based forgetting mechanisms, pruning and non-pruning strategies and linear and kernel functions, are utilized to ap-ply weights. A clustering technique is employed to detect the user's changing preferences. We apply our research approach to the DeliBook dataset. The goal of our experiments is to show that our algorithm that incorporates tempo-ral factors provides better recommendations than existing methods."

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2017-06-14T16:52:48Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Ismael Messias Gomes Cardoso_.pdf: 1842376 bytes, checksum: 60eed8afd2b70fbe501d63c0e1b81c39 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-14T16:52:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ismael Messias Gomes Cardoso_.pdf: 1842376 bytes, checksum: 60eed8afd2b70fbe501d63c0e1b81c39 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-16 / UNISINOS - Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos / The use of recommender systems is already widespread. Everyday people are exposed to different items’ offering that infer their interest and anticipate decisions. The context information (such as location, goals, and entities around a context) plays a key role in the recommendation’s accuracy. Extending contexts snapshots into contexts histories enables that information to be exploit. It is possible to identify context’s sequences, similar contexts histories and even predict future contexts. In this work we present Vulcont, a recommender system based on a contexts history ontology. Vulcont merges the benefits of ontology reasoning with contexts histories in order to measure contexts history similarity, based on semantic and ontology’s properties provided by context’s domain. Vulcont considers synonymous and classes’ relations to measure similarity. After that, a collaborative filtering approach identifies sequences’ frequency to identify potential items for recommendation. We evaluated and discussed the Vulcont’s recommendation in four scenarios in an offline experiment, which presents Vulcont’s recommendation power, due the exploit of semantic value of contexts history. / O uso de sistemas de recomendação já é amplamente difundido. Diariamente pessoas são expostas a ofertas de itens que inferem seus interesses e antecipam decisões. As informações de contexto (como localização, objetivos, e entidades que cercam um contexto) tem um papel chave na acurácia da recomendação. Ampliando o uso de contextos para histórico de contextos, essa informação pode ser explorada ainda mais. É possível identificar sequências de contextos, similaridade entre histórico de contextos, e até prever contextos futuros. Neste trabalho é apresentado o Vulcont, um sistema de recomendação baseado numa ontologia de histórico de contextos. Vulcont une os benefícios do raciocínio da ontologia com o uso de histórico de contextos para quantificar a similaridade entre histórico de contextos, com base na semântica e outras propriedades da ontologia definidas pelo domínio do contexto. Vulcont considera sinônimos e relações de classes para calcular a similaridade. Por seguinte, um filtro colaborativo identifica a frequência de sequências para estimar items em potencial de recomendação. As recomendações do Vulcont foram avaliadas e discutidas em quatro cenários num experimento offline. O experimento apresentou o poder de recomendação do Vulcont, que é devido a exploração do valor semântico de histórico de contextos.

Submitted by Erika Demachki (erikademachki@gmail.com) on 2015-02-06T20:35:15Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Everton Lima Aleixo - 2014.pdf: 2375638 bytes, checksum: accbd56745e040e23362d951a1336538 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Erika Demachki (erikademachki@gmail.com) on 2015-02-06T20:35:41Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Everton Lima Aleixo - 2014.pdf: 2375638 bytes, checksum: accbd56745e040e23362d951a1336538 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-02-06T20:35:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Everton Lima Aleixo - 2014.pdf: 2375638 bytes, checksum: accbd56745e040e23362d951a1336538 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-09-02 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Memory-based algorithms are the most popular among the collaborative filtering algorithms. They use as input a table containing ratings given by users to items, known as the rating matrix. They predict the rating given by user a to an item i by computing similarities of the ratings among users or similarities of the ratings among items. In the first case Memory-Based algorithms are classified as User-based algorithms and in the second one they are labeled as Item-based algorithms. The prediction is computed using the ratings of k most similar users (or items), also know as neighbors. Memory-based algorithms are simple to understand and to program, usually provide accurate recommendation and are less sensible to data change. However, to obtain the most similar neighbors for a prediction they have to process all the data which is a serious scalability problem. Also they are sensitive to the sparsity of the input. In this work we propose an efficient and effective Item-Based that aims at diminishing the sensibility of the Memory-Based approach to both problems stated above. The algorithm is faster (almost 50%) than the traditional Item-Based algorithm while maintaining the same level of accuracy. However, in environments that have much data to predict and few to train the algorithm, the accuracy of the proposed algorithm surpass significantly that of the traditional Item-based algorithms. Our approach can also be easily adapted to be used as User-based algorithms. / Algoritmos baseados em memória são os mais populares entre os algoritmos de filtragem colaborativa. Eles usam como entrada uma tabela contendo as avaliações feitas pelos usuários aos itens, conhecida como matriz de avaliações. Eles predizem a avaliação dada por um usuário a a um item i, computando a similaridade de avaliações entre a e outros usuários ou entre i e outros itens. No primeiro caso, os algoritmos baseados em memória são classificados como algoritmos baseados em usuários (User-based) e no segundo caso são rotulados como algoritmos baseados em itens (Item-Based). A predição é computada usando as avaliações dos k usuários (ou itens) mais similares, também conhecidos como vizinhos. Algoritmos baseados em memória são simples de entender e implementar. Normalmente produzem boas recomendações e são menos sensíveis a mudança nos dados. Entretanto, para obter os vizinhos mais similares para a predição, eles necessitam processar todos os dados da matriz, o que é um sério problema de escalabilidade. Eles também são sensíveis a densidade dos dados. Neste trabalho, nós propomos um algoritmo eficiente e eficaz baseado em itens que visa diminuir a sensibilidade dos algoritmos baseados em memória para ambos os problemas acima referidos. Esse algoritmo é mais rápido (quase 50%) do que o algoritmo baseado em itens tradicional, mantendo o mesmo nível de acurácia. Entretanto, em ambientes onde existem muitos dados para predizer e poucos para treinar o algoritmo, a acurácia do algoritmo proposto supera significativamente a do algoritmo tradicional baseado em itens. Nossa abordagem pode ainda ser facilmente adaptada para ser utilizada como o algoritmo baseado em usuários.

abstract: Social media has become the norm of everyone for communication. The usage of social media has increased exponentially in the last decade. The myriads of Social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram etc allow people to connect with their friends, and followers freely. The attackers who try to take advantage of this situation has also increased at an exponential rate. Every social media service has its own recommender systems and user profiling algorithms. These algorithms use users current information to make different recommendations. Often the data that is formed from social media services is Linked data as each item/user is usually linked with other users/items. Recommender systems due to their ubiquitous and prominent nature are prone to several forms of attacks. One of the major form of attacks is poisoning the training set data. As recommender systems use current user/item information as the training set to make recommendations, the attacker tries to modify the training set in such a way that the recommender system would benefit the attacker or give incorrect recommendations and hence failing in its basic functionality. Most existing training set attack algorithms work with ``flat" attribute-value data which is typically assumed to be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). However, the i.i.d. assumption does not hold for social media data since it is inherently linked as described above. Usage of user-similarity with Graph Regularizer in morphing the training data produces best results to attacker. This thesis proves the same by demonstrating with experiments on Collaborative Filtering with multiple datasets. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2019

Retail managers have been interested in learning about cross-category purchase behavior of their customers for a fairly long time. More recently, the task of inferring cross-category relationship patterns among retail assortments is gaining attraction due to its promotional potential within recommender systems used in online environments. Collaborative filtering algorithms are frequently used in such settings for the prediction of choices, preferences and/or ratings of online users. This paper investigates the suitability of such methods for situations when only binary pick-any customer information (i.e., choice/nonchoice of items, such as shopping basket data) is available. We present an extension of collaborative filtering algorithms for such data situations and apply it to a real-world retail transaction dataset. The new method is benchmarked against more conventional algorithms and can be shown to deliver superior results in terms of predictive accuracy. (author's abstract) / Series: Report Series SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

Privacy is defined as the freedom from unauthorized intrusion. The availability of personal information through online databases, such as government records, medical records, and voters and #146; lists, pose a threat to personal privacy. The concern over individual privacy has led to the development of legal codes for safeguarding privacy in several countries. However, the ignorance of individuals as well as loopholes in the systems, have led to information breaches even in the presence of such rules and regulations. Protection against data privacy requires modification of the data itself. The term {em data obfuscation} is used to refer to the class of algorithms that modify the values of the data items without distorting the usefulness of the data. The main goal of this thesis is the development of a data obfuscation technique that provides robust privacy protection with minimal loss in usability of the data. Although medical and financial services are two of the major areas where information privacy is a concern, privacy breaches are not restricted to these domains. One of the areas where the concern over data privacy is of growing interest is collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering systems are being widely used in E-commerce applications to provide recommendations to users regarding products that might be of interest to them. The prediction accuracy of these systems is dependent on the size and accuracy of the data provided by users. However, the lack of sufficient guidelines governing the use and distribution of user data raises concerns over individual privacy. Users often provide the minimal information that is required for accessing these E-commerce services. The lack of rules governing the use and distribution of data disallows sharing of data among different communities for collaborative filtering. The goals of this thesis are (a) the definition of a standard for classifying DO techniques, (b) the development of a robust cluster preserving data obfuscation algorithm, and (c) the design and implementation of a privacy-preserving shared collaborative filtering framework using the data obfuscation algorithm.

As the Internet became widespread all over the world, people started to share great amount of data on the web and almost every people joined different data networks in order to have a quick access to data shared among people and survive against the information overload on the web. Recommender systems are created to provide users more personalized information services and to make data available for people without an extra effort. Most of these systems aim to get or learn user preferences, explicitly or implicitly depending to the system, and guess &ldquo / preferable data&rdquo / that has not already been consumed by the user. Traditional approaches use user/item similarity or item content information to filter items for the active user / however most of the recent approaches also consider the trustworthiness of users. By using trustworthiness, only reliable users according to the target user opinion will be considered during information retrieval. Within this thesis work, a content boosted method of using trust data in recommender systems is proposed. It is aimed to be shown that people who trust the active user and the people, whom the active user trusts, also have correlated opinions with the active user. This results the fact that the rated items by these people can also be used while offering new items to users. For this research, www.epinions.com site is crawled, in order to access user trust relationships, product content information and review ratings which are ratings given by users to product reviews that are written by other users.

Data analysis has become a very important area for both companies and researchers as a consequence of the technological developments in recent years. Companies are trying to increase their profit by analyzing the existing data about their customers and making decisions for the future according to the results of these analyses. Parallel to the need of companies, researchers are investigating different methodologies to analyze data more accurately with high performance. Recommender systems are one of the most popular and widespread data analysis tools. A recommender system applies knowledge discovery techniques to the existing data and makes personalized product recommendations during live customer interaction. However, the huge growth of customers and products especially on the internet, poses some challenges for recommender systems, producing high quality recommendations and performing millions of recommendations per second. In order to improve the performance of recommender systems, researchers have proposed many different methods. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) technique based on dimension reduction is one of these methods which produces high quality recommendations, but has to undergo very expensive matrix calculations. In this thesis, we propose and experimentally validate some contributions to SVD technique which are based on the user and the item categorization. Besides, we adopt tags to classical 2D (User-Item) SVD technique and report the results of experiments. Results are promising to make more accurate and scalable recommender systems.

This thesis proposes the design, development and evaluation of a hybrid video recommendation system. The proposed hybrid video recommendation system is based on a graph algorithm called Adsorption. Adsorption is a collaborative filtering algorithm in which relations between users are used to make recommendations. Adsorption is used to generate the base recommendation list. In order to overcome the problems that occur in pure collaborative system, content based filtering is injected. Content based filtering uses the idea of suggesting similar items that matches user preferences. In order to use content based filtering, first, the base recommendation list is updated by removing weak recommendations. Following this, item similarities of the remaining list are calculated and new items are inserted to form the final recommendations. Thus, collaborative recommendations are empowered considering item similarities. Therefore, the developed hybrid system combines both collaborative and content based approaches to produce more effective suggestions.