Francisco Mugica | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Alternatives to Shallow Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a cornerstone of recommender systems and plays a relevant role in many modern applications. CF uses user-item interaction data to discover future preferences. Although deep learning models have shown promise in CF, Embarrassingly Shallow Autoencoders for Sparse Data (EASE) has gained attention for its outstanding ranking accuracy provided by its closed-form solution. EASE relies primarily on relationships among items to fit a full-rank high-dimensional linear mapping. We hypothesize that this design limits its capacity to capture similar but not equivalent fine-grained user relationships, consequently limiting its recommendation accuracy. This paper introduces an alternative formulation based on EASE that takes advantage of user-user information. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid model that combines both user-user and item-item adjacency distributions. Our experiments reveal that the proposed models outperform EASE on well-known recommendation benchmarks, highlighting the significance of including the user alternative in shallow autoencoder studies for CF.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2012

Dealing with uncertainty in fuzzy inductive reasoning methodology

The aim of this research is to develop a reasoning under uncertainty strategy in the context of the Fuzzy Inductive Reasoning (FIR) methodology. FIR emerged from the General Systems Problem Solving developed by G. Klir. It is a data driven methodology based on systems behavior rather than on structural knowledge. It is a very useful tool for both the modeling and the prediction of those systems for which no previous structural knowledge is available. FIR reasoning is based on pattern rules synthesized from the available data. The size of the pattern rule base can be very large making the prediction process quite difficult. In order to reduce the size of the pattern rule base, it is possible to automatically extract classical Sugeno fuzzy rules starting from the set of pattern rules. The Sugeno rule base preserves pattern rules knowledge as much as possible. In this process some information is lost but robustness is considerably increased. In the forecasting process either the pattern rule base or the Sugeno fuzzy rule base can be used. The first option is desirable when the computational resources make it possible to deal with the overall pattern rule base or when the extracted fuzzy rules are not accurate enough due to uncertainty associated to the original data. In the second option, the prediction process is done by means of the classical Sugeno inference system. If the amount of uncertainty associated to the data is small, the predictions obtained using the Sugeno fuzzy rule base will be very accurate. In this paper a mixed pattern/fuzzy rules strategy is proposed to deal with uncertainty in such a way that the best of both perspectives is used. Areas in the data space with a higher level of uncertainty are identified by means of the so-called error models. The prediction process in these areas makes use of a mixed pattern/fuzzy rules scheme, whereas areas identified with a lower level of uncertainty only use the Sugeno fuzzy rule base. The proposed strategy is applied to a real biomedical system, i.e., the central nervous system control of the cardiovascular system.

cs.AI↗