This dissertation studies data privacy preservation in collaborative filtering based recommender systems and proposes several collaborative filtering models that aim at preserving user privacy from different perspectives. The empirical study on multiple classical recommendation algorithms presents the basic idea of the models and explores their performance on real world datasets. The algorithms that are investigated in this study include a popularity based model, an item similarity based model, a singular value decomposition based model, and a bipartite graph model. Top-N recommendations are evaluated to examine the prediction accuracy. It is apparent that with more customers' preference data, recommender systems can better profile customers' shopping patterns which in turn produces product recommendations with higher accuracy. The precautions should be taken to address the privacy issues that arise during data sharing between two vendors. Study shows that matrix factorization techniques are ideal choices for data privacy preservation by their nature. In this dissertation, singular value decomposition (SVD) and nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) are adopted as the fundamental techniques for collaborative filtering to make privacy-preserving recommendations. The proposed SVD based model utilizes missing value imputation, randomization technique, and the truncated SVD to perturb the raw rating data. The NMF based models, namely iAux-NMF and iCluster-NMF, take into account the auxiliary information of users and items to help missing value imputation and privacy preservation. Additionally, these models support efficient incremental data update as well. A good number of online vendors allow people to leave their feedback on products. It is considered as users' public preferences. However, due to the connections between users' public and private preferences, if a recommender system fails to distinguish real customers from attackers, the private preferences of real customers can be exposed. This dissertation addresses an attack model in which an attacker holds real customers' partial ratings and tries to obtain their private preferences by cheating recommender systems. To resolve this problem, trustworthiness information is incorporated into NMF based collaborative filtering techniques to detect the attackers and make reasonably different recommendations to the normal users and the attackers. By doing so, users' private preferences can be effectively protected.

This dissertation shows that nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) can be extended to a general and efficient clustering method. Clustering is one of the fundamental tasks in machine learning. It is useful for unsupervised knowledge discovery in a variety of applications such as text mining and genomic analysis. NMF is a dimension reduction method that approximates a nonnegative matrix by the product of two lower rank nonnegative matrices, and has shown great promise as a clustering method when a data set is represented as a nonnegative data matrix. However, challenges in the widespread use of NMF as a clustering method lie in its correctness and efficiency: First, we need to know why and when NMF could detect the true clusters and guarantee to deliver good clustering quality; second, existing algorithms for computing NMF are expensive and often take longer time than other clustering methods. We show that the original NMF can be improved from both aspects in the context of clustering. Our new NMF-based clustering methods can achieve better clustering quality and run orders of magnitude faster than the original NMF and other clustering methods. Like other clustering methods, NMF places an implicit assumption on the cluster structure. Thus, the success of NMF as a clustering method depends on whether the representation of data in a vector space satisfies that assumption. Our approach to extending the original NMF to a general clustering method is to switch from the vector space representation of data points to a graph representation. The new formulation, called Symmetric NMF, takes a pairwise similarity matrix as an input and can be viewed as a graph clustering method. We evaluate this method on document clustering and image segmentation problems and find that it achieves better clustering accuracy. In addition, for the original NMF, it is difficult but important to choose the right number of clusters. We show that the widely-used consensus NMF in genomic analysis for choosing the number of clusters have critical flaws and can produce misleading results. We propose a variation of the prediction strength measure arising from statistical inference to evaluate the stability of clusters and select the right number of clusters. Our measure shows promising performances in artificial simulation experiments. Large-scale applications bring substantial efficiency challenges to existing algorithms for computing NMF. An important example is topic modeling where users want to uncover the major themes in a large text collection. Our strategy of accelerating NMF-based clustering is to design algorithms that better suit the computer architecture as well as exploit the computing power of parallel platforms such as the graphic processing units (GPUs). A key observation is that applying rank-2 NMF that partitions a data set into two clusters in a recursive manner is much faster than applying the original NMF to obtain a flat clustering. We take advantage of a special property of rank-2 NMF and design an algorithm that runs faster than existing algorithms due to continuous memory access. Combined with a criterion to stop the recursion, our hierarchical clustering algorithm runs significantly faster and achieves even better clustering quality than existing methods. Another bottleneck of NMF algorithms, which is also a common bottleneck in many other machine learning applications, is to multiply a large sparse data matrix with a tall-and-skinny dense matrix. We use the GPUs to accelerate this routine for sparse matrices with an irregular sparsity structure. Overall, our algorithm shows significant improvement over popular topic modeling methods such as latent Dirichlet allocation, and runs more than 100 times faster on data sets with millions of documents.

Nagrinėjama antrosios eilės diferencialinė lygtis su skirtingomis potencialo reikšmėmis. / We have the second order equation with different potential.

Low-rank matrix factorizations have become increasingly popular to project high dimensional data into latent spaces with small dimensions in order to obtain better understandings of the data and thus more accurate predictions. In particular, they have been widely applied to important applications such as collaborative filtering and social network analysis. In this thesis, I investigate the applications and extensions of the ideas of the low-rank matrix factorization to solve several practically important problems arise from collaborative filtering and social network analysis. A key challenge in recommendation system research is how to effectively profile new users, a problem generally known as \emph{cold-start} recommendation. In the first part of this work, we extend the low-rank matrix factorization by allowing the latent factors to have more complex structures --- decision trees to solve the problem of cold-start recommendations. In particular, we present \emph{functional matrix factorization} (fMF), a novel cold-start recommendation method that solves the problem of adaptive interview construction based on low-rank matrix factorizations. The second part of this work considers the efficiency problem of making recommendations in the context of large user and item spaces. Specifically, we address the problem through learning binary codes for collaborative filtering, which can be viewed as restricting the latent factors in low-rank matrix factorizations to be binary vectors that represent the binary codes for both users and items. In the third part of this work, we investigate the applications of low-rank matrix factorizations in the context of social network analysis. Specifically, we propose a convex optimization approach to discover the hidden network of social influence with low-rank and sparse structure by modeling the recurrent events at different individuals as multi-dimensional Hawkes processes, emphasizing the mutual-excitation nature of the dynamics of event occurrences. The proposed framework combines the estimation of mutually exciting process and the low-rank matrix factorization in a principled manner. In the fourth part of this work, we estimate the triggering kernels for the Hawkes process. In particular, we focus on estimating the triggering kernels from an infinite dimensional functional space with the Euler Lagrange equation, which can be viewed as applying the idea of low-rank factorizations in the functional space.

Thesis (M.S.); Submitted to Iowa State Univ., Ames, IA (US); 19 Dec 2004. / Published through the Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information. "IS-T 2196" Rahul Ravindrudu. US Department of Energy 12/19/2004. Report is also available in paper and microfiche from NTIS.

Thesis (MScEng (Mathematical Sciences. Applied Mathematics))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / Engineers struggle to replicate the capabilities of the sophisticated human visual system. This thesis sets out to recover motion and 3D structure of multiple rigid objects up to a similarity. The motion of these objects are either recorded in a single video sequence, or images of the objects are recorded on multiple, di erent cameras. We assume a perspective camera model with optional provision for calibration information. The Structure from Motion (SfM) problem is addressed from a matrix factorization point of view. This leads to a reconstruction correct up to a projectivity of little use in itself. Using techniques from camera autocalibration the projectivity is upgraded to a similarity. This reconstruction is also applied to multiple objects through motion segmentation. The SfM system developed in this thesis is a batch-processing algorithm, requiring few frames for a solution and readily accepts images from very di erent viewpoints. Since a solution can be obtained with just a few frames, it can be used to initialize sequential methods with slower convergence rates, such as the Kalman lter. The SfM system is critically evaluated against an extensive set of motion sequences.

One of the most popular methods in recommender systems are matrix factorization (MF) models. In this paper, the sensitivity of sparsity of these models are investigated using a simulation study. Using the MovieLens dataset as a base several dense matrices are created. These dense matrices are then made sparse in two different ways to simulate different kinds of data. The accuracy of MF is then measured on each of the simulated sparse matrices. This shows that the matrix factorization models are sensitive to the degree of information available. For high levels of sparsity the MF performs badly but as the information level increases the accuracy of the models improve, for both samples.

Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Doina Caragea / Huge amounts of data that are generated on social media during emergency situations are regarded as troves of critical information. The use of supervised machine learning techniques in the early stages of a disaster is challenged by the lack of labeled data for that particular disaster. Furthermore, supervised models trained on labeled data from a prior disaster may not produce accurate results. To address these challenges, domain adaptation approaches, which learn models for predicting the target, by using unlabeled data from the target disaster in addition to labeled data from prior source disasters, can be used. However, the resulting models can still be affected by the variance between the target domain and the source domain. In this context, we propose to use a hybrid feature-instance adaptation approach based on matrix factorization and the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, respectively. The proposed hybrid adaptation approach is used to select a subset of the source disaster data that is representative of the target disaster. The selected subset is subsequently used to learn accurate supervised or domain adaptation Naïve Bayes classifiers for the target disaster. In other words, this study focuses on transforming the existing source data to bring it closer to the target data, thus overcoming the domain variance which may prevent effective transfer of information from source to target. A combination of selective and transformative methods are used on instances and features, respectively. We show experimentally that the proposed approaches are effective in transferring information from source to target. Furthermore, we provide insights with respect to what types and combinations of selections/transformations result in more accurate models for the target.

[pt] O trabalho apresenta uma teoria de fatorações coprimas para sistemas não lineares e aplicações dessa teoria em problemas de controle. A parte inicial é exatamente a teoria de fatorações coprimas, que se assemelha à versão linear. O problema da estabilização de sistemas não lineares é resolvido através de realimentação aditiva, com pré e pós compensadores dinâmicos não lineares. A solução para esse problema é dada na forma da classe de compensadores que estabilizam o sistema. São também apresentadas condições para a estabilidade na presença de ruídos aditivos. Outro problema bastante relevante do ponto de vista de controles é o da especificação da dinâmica do sistema de malha fechada. O enfoque apresenta soluções de caráter local, o que permite que a dinâmica a ser especificada seja definida apenas sobre uma restrição do espeço de entrada. Dessa forma tornou-se factível a especificação de dinâmicas dentro de uma classe relativamente ampla. São discutidas possibilidades para o problema da regulação. Também utilizando condiçòes locais é apresentada uma teoria de estabilização robusta com relação a perturbações não estruturadas. Algumas soluções explícitas e relativamente estruturadas são apresentadas. / [en] The control of nonlinear systems via coprime factorization is the subject of this dissertation. Initially, a broad theory concerning nonlinear factorizations is presented. The class of stabilizing controllers for a given nonlinear plant is derived using that theory. Then, there are derived sufficient conditions for the closed loop system are also presented. One of the major departures from the original work on nonlinear factorizations is the fact that the solutions presented need only to be locally derived, which allows a wider class of dynamics to be assigned for the closed loop input- output transference relation. The robust control of nonlinear systems is achieved through the use of locally defined solutions, allowing to control systems subject to some relatively structured perturbations.

L’imagerie hyperspectrale est un type d’imagerie émergent qui connaît un essor important depuis le début des années 2000. Grâce à une structure spectrale très fine qui produit un volume de donnée très important, elle apporte, par rapport à l’imagerie visible classique, un supplément d’information pouvant être mis à profit dans de nombreux domaines d’exploitation. Nous nous intéressons spécifiquement à la détection et l’analyse de changements entre deux images de la même scène, pour des applications orientées vers la défense.Au sein de ce manuscrit, nous commençons par présenter l’imagerie hyperspectrale et les contraintes associées à son utilisation pour des problématiques de défense. Nous présentons ensuite une méthode de détection et de classification de changements basée sur la recherche de directions spécifiques dans l’espace généré par le couple d’images, puis sur la fusion des directions proches. Nous cherchons ensuite à exploiter l’information obtenue sur les changements en nous intéressant aux possibilités de dé-mélange de séries temporelles d’images d’une même scène. Enfin, nous présentons un certain nombre d’extensions qui pourront être réalisées afin de généraliser ou améliorer les travaux présentés et nous concluons. / Hyperspectral imagery is an emerging imagery technology which has known a growing interest since the 2000’s. This technology allows an impressive growth of the data registered from a specific scene compared to classical RGB imagery. Indeed, although the spatial resolution is significantly lower, the spectral resolution is very small and the covered spectral area is very wide. We focus on change detection between two images of a given scene for defense oriented purposes.In the following, we start by introducing hyperspectral imagery and the specificity of its exploitation for defence purposes. We then present a change detection and analysis method based on the search for specifical directions in the space generated by the image couple, followed by a merging of the nearby directions. We then exploit this information focusing on theunmixing capabilities of multitemporal hyperspectral data. Finally, we will present a range of further works that could be done in relation with our work and conclude about it.