Recommender Systems (RS) support users to find relevant content, such as movies, books, songs, and other products based on their preferences. Such preferences are gathered by analyzing past users interactions, however, data collected for this purpose are typically prone to sparsity and high dimensionality. Clustering-based techniques have been proposed to handle these problems effectively and efficiently by segmenting the data into a number of similar groups based on predefined characteristics. Although these techniques have gained increasing attention in the recommender systems community, they are usually bound to a particular recommender system and/or require critical parameters, such as the number of clusters. In this work, we present three variants of a general-purpose method to optimally extract users groups from a hierarchical clustering algorithm specifically targeting RS problems. The proposed extraction methods do not require critical parameters and can be applied prior to any recommendation system. Our experiments have shown promising recommendation results in the context of nine well-known public datasets from different domains. / Sistemas de Recomendação auxiliam usuários a encontrar conteúdo relevante, como filmes, livros, músicas entre outros produtos baseando-se em suas preferências. Tais preferências são obtidas ao analisar interações passadas dos usuários, no entanto, dados coletados com esse propósito tendem a tipicamente possuir alta dimensionalidade e esparsidade. Técnicas baseadas em agrupamento de dados têm sido propostas para lidar com esses problemas de foma eficiente e eficaz ao dividir os dados em grupos similares baseando-se em características pré-definidas. Ainda que essas técnicas tenham recebido atenção crescente na comunidade de sistemas de recomendação, tais técnicas são usualmente atreladas a um algoritmo de recomendação específico e/ou requerem parâmetros críticos, como número de grupos. Neste trabalho, apresentamos três variantes de um método de propósitvo geral de extração ótima de grupos em uma hierarquia, atacando especificamente problemas em Sistemas de Recomendação. Os métodos de extração propostos não requerem parâmetros críticos e podem ser aplicados antes de qualquer sistema de recomendação. Os experimentos mostraram resultados promissores no contexto de nove bases de dados públicas conhecidas em diferentes domínios.

São muitas as pesquisas nos dias de hoje que buscam por métodos e ferramentas para aumentar a autonomia do aluno na condução dos processos de aprendizagem, uma vez que os métodos tradicionais de ensino nem sempre se mostram eficazes na formação de estudantes com capacidade crítica, coerente com as necessidades do mundo atual. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo investigar de que modo uma atividade de Aprendizagem Baseada em Projetos (ABPr), apoiada por um ambiente tecnológico desenvolvido para este fim, pode contribuir no desenvolvimento de projetos por meio de recursos de recomendação de conteúdo e ferramentas de colaboração entre pares. Para isto é utilizado uma abordagem ativa de aprendizagem, a ABPr, definida como um método de aprendizagem centrado no aluno e que enfatiza atividades para o desenvolvimento de projetos. Durante este processo os alunos podem tomar suas próprias decisões e agir sozinhos ou em grupos. Para a aplicação do método proposto foi estruturada uma atividade educacional, que consiste no desenvolvimento de um projeto a partir das investigações dos alunos em relação a um tema proposto pelo professor. O desenvolvimento deste projeto se inicia e termina em sala de aula, entretanto as fases intermediárias podem ocorrer em outros locais. Para a execução da atividade foi desenvolvida uma ferramenta que incentiva a colaboração entre os alunos. Isto permite uma maior interação entre os participantes e também a possibilidade dos alunos colaborarem nos projetos uns dos outros. Durante o desenvolvimento de seus projetos, a ferramenta sugere materiais complementares relacionados ao assunto tratado, como forma auxiliar os alunos em seus processos investigativos. Para a avaliação do trabalho proposto foi estruturada uma pesquisa quali-quantitativa, na modalidade estudo de caso, com coleta de dados por meio da análise de projetos, registro de atividades, questionários e entrevistas. Os resultados obtidos através dos experimentos realizados demonstraram que a atividade educacional proposta por este trabalho contribuiu de forma significativa para o desenvolvimento de projetos e para uma maior interação entre os alunos. / Many research works focus on the development of methods and tools to increase student autonomy in the conduct of learning processes, as traditional teaching methods are not always effective in training students with critical skills, in accordance with the needs of today's world. This study aims to investigate how a Project-based Learning (PBL) activity, supported by a technological environment developed for this purpose, can contribute to the development of projects by means of content recommendation resources and collaboration tools among peers. For this reason, an active learning approach is used, PBL, defined as a student-centered learning method that emphasizes activities for project development. During this process students can make their own decisions and act alone or in groups. For the application of the proposed method an educational activity was structured consisting in the development of a project based on students' investigations related to a topic proposed by the teacher. The development of this project starts and ends in the classroom, but the intermediate stages can occur in other places. For the execution of the activity, a tool was developed for fostering collaboration between students. This allows a higher interaction between participants and the possibility of students to collaborate on each other's projects. During the development of their projects, the tool suggests additional materials related to the subject at hand, as a way to assist students in their research processes. For the evaluation of the proposed work a quali-quantitative study was structured, with data collection performed from project analysis, activity logging, questionnaires and interviews. Results from the experiments performed showed that the educational activity proposed by this work contributed significantly to the development of projects and for a higher interaction among students.

Sistemas de recomendação foram propostos no início da década de 1990 com o objetivo de auxiliar seus usuários a lidar com a sobrecarga cognitiva criada com o advento da internet e o aumento constante de documentos. De lá para cá tais sistemas passaram a assumir vários outros papéis, tais como “auxiliar usuários a explorar”, “melhorar a tomada de decisão”, ou até mesmo “entreter”. Para atingir tais novos objetivos, o sistema necessita olhar para características do usuário que auxiliem no entendimento da tarefa desempenhada pelo usuário e como a recomendação pode auxiliar tal tarefa. Nesse sentido, propõe-se nessa tese uma integração entre estratégias de recomendação e de adaptação para criar um novo processo de recomendação adaptativa. É mostrado que tal integração pode melhorar a acurácia da recomendação, e dar bons resultados na retenção de usuários, e na interação destes com os sistemas. Para validar a abordagem, é implementado um protótipo para recomendação de filmes a serem utilizados em sala de aula. São também coletadas estatísticas de 78 usuários que participaram do experimento de avaliação da abordagem. / Recommender systems were proposed in early 90’s with the goal to help users deal with cognitive overload brought by the internet and the constant increase of documents. From there to now such systems have assumed many other roles like “help users to explore”, “improve decision making”, or even “entertain”. To accomplish such new goals, the system needs to look to user characteristics that help in understand what the user task is and how to adapt the recommendation to support such task. In this direction, it is proposed in this thesis an integration between recommender and adaptive strategies into a new process of adaptive recommendation. It is shown that such integration can improve recommendation accuracy and give good results to user retention, and interaction with the systems. To validate the approach, it is implemented a prototype to recommend movies to be used in a classroom. It is also collected some statistics about the 78 users who have participated of the experiment for evaluation of the new approach.

The act of reading has benefits for individuals and societies, yet studies show that reading declines, especially among the young. Recommender systems (RSs) can help stop such decline. There is a lot of research regarding literary books using natural language processing (NLP) methods, but the analysis of textual book content to improve recommendations is relatively rare. We propose content-based recommender systems that extract elements learned from book texts to predict readers’ future interests. One factor that influences reading preferences is writing style; we propose a system that recommends books after learning their authors’ writing style. To our knowledge, this is the first work that transfers the information learned by an author-identification model to a book RS. Another approach that we propose uses over a hundred lexical, syntactic, stylometric, and fiction-based features that might play a role in generating high-quality book recommendations. Previous book RSs include very few stylometric features; hence, our study is the first to include and analyze a wide variety of textual elements for book recommendations. We evaluated both approaches according to a top-k recommendation scenario. They give better accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art content and collaborative filtering methods. We highlight the significant factors that contributed to the accuracy of the recommendations using a forest of randomized regression trees. We also conducted a qualitative analysis by checking if similar books/authors were annotated similarly by experts. Our content-based systems suffer from the new user problem, well-known in the field of RSs, that hinders their ability to make accurate recommendations. Therefore, we propose a Topic Model-Based book recommendation component (TMB) that addresses the issue by using the topics learned from a user’s shared text on social media, to recognize their interests and map them to related books. To our knowledge, there is no literature regarding book RSs that exploits public social networks other than book-cataloging websites. Using topic modeling techniques, extracting user interests can be automatic and dynamic, without the need to search for predefined concepts. Though TMB is designed to complement other systems, we evaluated it against a traditional book CB. We assessed the top k recommendations made by TMB and CB and found that both retrieved a comparable number of books, even though CB relied on users’ rating history, while TMB only required their social profiles.

As one of the social relations, "distrust" also performs an important role in online Web sites. We also observe that distrust information can also be incorporated to improve recommendation quality. Hence, the last part of this thesis studies the problem on how to improve recommender system by considering explicit distrust information among users. We make the assumption that users' distrust relations can be interpreted as the "dissimilar" relations since user ui distrusts user ud indicates that user ui disagrees with most of the opinions issued by user ud. Based on this intuition, the distrust relations between users can be easily modeled by adding the regularization term into the objective functions of the user-item matrix factorization. The experiments on the Epinions dataset indicate that distrust information is at least as important as trust information. / However, the data sparsity problem of the involved user-item matrix seriously affects the recommendation quality. Many existing approaches to recommender systems cannot easily deal with users who have made very few ratings. The objective of this thesis is to study how to build effective and efficient approaches to improve the recommendation performance. / In this thesis, we first propose two collaborative filtering methods which only utilize the user-item matrix for recommendations. The first method is a neighborhood-based collaborative filtering method which designs an effective missing data prediction algorithm to improve recommendation quality, while the second one is a model-based collaborative filtering method which employs matrix factorization technique to make the recommendation more accurate. / In view of the exponential growth of information generated by online users, social contextual information analysis is becoming important for many Web applications. Hence, based on the assumption that users can be easily influenced by the friends they trust and prefer their friends' recommendations, we propose two recommendation algorithms by incorporating users' social trust information. These two methods are based on probabilistic matrix factorization. The complexity analysis indicates that our approaches can be applied to very large datasets since they scale linearly with the number of observations, while the experimental results show that our methods perform better than the state-of-the-art approaches. / Recommender Systems are becoming increasingly indispensable nowadays since they focus on solving the information overload problem, by providing users with more proactive and personalized information services. Typically, recommender systems are based on Collaborative Filtering, which is a technique that automatically predicts the interest of an active user by collecting rating information from other similar users or items. Due to their potential commercial values and the associated great research challenges, Recommender systems have been extensively studied by both academia and industry recently. / Ma, Hao. / "December 2009." / Advisers: Irwin King; Michael R. Lyu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-01, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-154). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearable devices, have become a popular platform to deliver recommendations and interact with users. To learn the decision rule of assigning recommendations, i.e. policy, neither one homogeneous policy for all users nor completely heterogeneous policy for each user is appropriate. Many attempts have been made to learn a policy for making recommendations using observational mobile health (mHealth) data. The majority of them focuses on a homogeneous policy, that is a one-fit-to-all policy for all users. It is a fair starting point for mHealth study, but it ignores the underlying user heterogeneity. Users with similar behavior pattern may have unobservable underlying heterogeneity. To solve this problem, we develop a personalized learning framework that models both population and personalized effect simultaneously. In the first part of this dissertation, we address the personalized policy learning problem using longitudinal mHealth application usage data. Personalized policy represents a paradigm shift from developing a single policy that may prescribe personalized decisions by tailoring. Specifically, we aim to develop the best policy, one per user, based on estimating random effects under generalized linear mixed model. With many random effects, we consider new estimation method and penalized objective to circumvent high-dimensional integrals for marginal likelihood approximation. We establish consistency and optimality of our method with endogenous application usage. We apply our method to develop personalized prompt schedules in 294 application users, with a goal to maximize the prompt response rate given past application usage and other contextual factors. We found the best push schedule given the same covariates varied among the users, thus calling for personalized policies. Using the estimated personalized policies would have achieved a mean prompt response rate of 23% in these users at 16 weeks or later: this is a remarkable improvement on the observed rate (11%), while the literature suggests 3%-15% user engagement at 3 months after download. The proposed method compares favorably to existing estimation methods including using the R function glmer in a simulation study. In the second part of this dissertation, we aim to solve a practical problem in the mHealth area. Low response rate has been a major issue that blocks researchers from collecting high quality mHealth data. Therefore, developing a prompting system is important to keep user engagement and increase response rate. We aim to learn personalized prompting time for users in order to gain a high response rate. An extension of the personalized learning algorithm is applied on the Intellicare data that incorporates penalties of the population effect parameters and personalized effect parameters into learning the personalized decision rule of sending prompts. The number of personalized policy parameters increases with sample size. Since there is a large number of users in the Intellicare data, it is challenging to estimate such high dimensional parameters. To solve the computational issue, we employ a bagging method that first bootstraps subsamples and then ensembles parameters learned from each subsample. The analysis of Intellicare data shows that sending prompts at a personalized hour helps achieve a higher response rate compared to a one-fit-to-all prompting hour.

This study is a design science research (DSR) project in which a description of the development and evaluation process for several novel technological artifacts will be communicated. Specifically, this study will establish: 1) an ontology of recommender systems issues, 2) an ontology of financial capability goals, and 3) a framework for a Personal Financial Recommender System (PFRS) application designed to improve user financial capability, called FinPathlight. The impetus for the RecSys Issues Ontology is to address a gap in the literature by providing researchers with a comprehensive knowledge classification of the issues and limitations inherent to recommender systems research. The development of a Financial Capability Goals Ontology will contribute domain knowledge classification for technological systems within the domain of finance and serves as a recommendation item knowledgebase for our PFRS. The FinPathlight framework provides the architecture and principles of implementation for a novel, financial-technology (FinTech) PFRS. FinPathlight is designed to improve the financial capability of its users through the recommendation, tracking and assistance with achieving financial capability enhancing goals. This research is notable in that it expands the influence and furthers the relevance of information systems research by providing an explicitly applicable research solution to an area of significant socio-economic importance, financial capability, a heretofore unsolved “wicked problem” (Churchman 1967) domain. In light of current financial conditions, recommender systems research that addresses a problem such as consumer financial capability is a step towards ensuring that information systems research continues to matter and retain its influence and relevance in everyday practice.

Recommender systems emerged in the mid '90s with the objective of helping users select items or products most suited for them. Whether it is Facebook recommending people you might know, Spotify recommending songs you might like or Youtube recommending videos you might want to watch, recommender systems can now be found in every corner of the internet. In order to handle the immense increase of data online, the development of sophisticated recommender systems is crucial for filtering out information, enhancing web services by tailoring them according to the preferences of the user. This thesis aims to improve the accuracy of recommendations produced by a classical collaborative filtering recommender system by utilizing temporal properties, more precisely the date on which an item was rated by a user. Three different time-weighted implementations are presented and evaluated: time-weighted prediction approach, time-weighted similarity approach and our proposed approach, weighting the mean rating of a user on time. The different approaches are evaluated using the well known MovieLens 100k dataset. Results show that it is possible to slightly increase the accuracy of recommendations by utilizing temporal properties.

With the dramatic growth of the Internet, it is much easier for us to acquire information than before. It is, however, relatively difficult to extract desired information through the huge information pool. One method is to rely on the search engines by analyzing the queried keywords to locate the relevant information. The other one is to recommend users what they may be interested in via recommender systems that analyze the users¡¦ past preferences or other users with similar interests to lessen our information processing loadings. Typical recommendation techniques are classified into content-based filtering technique and collaborative filtering (CF) technique. Several research works in literature have indicated that the performance of collaborative filtering is superior to that of content-based filtering in that it is subject to neither the content format nor users¡¦ past experiences. The collaborative filtering technique, however, has its own limitation of the sparsity problem. To relieve such a problem, researchers proposed several CF-typed variants, including item-based CF and trust-based CF. Few works in literature, however, focus on their performance comparison. The objective of this research is thus to evaluate both approaches under different settings such as the sparsity degrees, data scales, and number of neighbors to make recommendations. We conducted two experiments to examine their performance. The results show that trust-based CF is generally better than item-based CF in sparsity problem. Their difference, however, becomes insignificant with the sparsity decreasing. In addition, the computational time for trust-based CF increases more quickly than that for item-based CF, even though both exhibit exponential growths. Finally, the optimal number of nearest neighbors in both approaches does not heavily depend on the data scale but displays steady robustness.

The Internet represents a unique opportunity for people to interact with each other across time and space, and online communities have existed long before the Internet's solidification in everyday living. There are two inherent challenges that online communities continue to contend with: motivating participation and organizing information. An online community's success or failure rests on the content generated by its users. Specifically, users need to continually participate by contributing new content and organizing existing content for others to be attracted and retained. I propose both participation and organization can be enhanced if users have an explicit awareness of the implicit social network which results from their online interactions. My approach makes this normally ``hidden" social network visible and shows users that these intangible relations have an impact on satisfying their information needs and vice versa. That is, users can more readily situate their information needs within social processes, understanding that the value of information they receive and give is influenced and has influence on the mostly incidental relations they have formed with others. First, I describe how to model a social network within an online discussion forum and visualize the subsequent relationships in a way that motivates participation. Second, I show that social networks can also be modeled to generate recommendations of information items and that, through an interactive visualization, users can make direct adjustments to the model in order to improve their personal recommendations. I conclude that these modeling and visualization techniques are beneficial to online communities as their social capital is enhanced by "weaving" users more tightly together.