Generation meets recommendation: proposing novel items for groups of users, Thanh Vinh Vo★, Harold Soh★, Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 2018
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Consider a movie studio aiming to produce a set of new movies for summer release: What types of movies it should produce? Who would the movies appeal to? How many movies should it make? Similar issues are encountered by a variety of organizations, e.g., mobile-phone manufacturers and online magazines, who have to create new (non-existent) items to satisfy groups of users with different preferences.
In this paper, we present a joint problem formalization of these interrelated issues, and propose generative methods that address these questions simultaneously. Specifically, we leverage on the latent space obtained by training a deep generative model—the Variational Autoencoder (VAE)—via a loss function that incorporates both rating performance and item reconstruction terms. We use a greedy search algorithm that utilize this learned latent space to jointly obtain K plausible new items, and user groups that would find the items appealing.
An evaluation of our methods on a synthetic dataset indicates that our approach is able to generate novel items similar to highly-desirable unobserved items. As case studies on real-world data, we applied our method on the MART abstract art and Movielens Tag Genome datasets, which resulted in promising results: small and diverse sets of novel items.
Resources
You can find our paper here.
Citation
Please consider citing our paper if you build upon our results and ideas.
Thanh Vinh Vo★, Harold Soh★, “Generation meets recommendation: proposing novel items for groups of users”, Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 2018
@inproceedings{vo2018generation,
title={Generation meets recommendation: proposing novel items for groups of users},
author={Vo, Thanh Vinh and Soh, Harold},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems},
pages={145--153},
year={2018} }
Contact
If you have questions or comments, please contact Harold.
