arXiv subjects

Ziwei Fan

Publications and source records attributed to Ziwei Fan.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Continuous-Time Sequential Recommendation with Temporal Graph Collaborative Transformer

In order to model the evolution of user preference, we should learn user/item embeddings based on time-ordered item purchasing sequences, which is defined as Sequential Recommendation (SR) problem. Existing methods leverage sequential patterns to model item transitions. However, most of them ignore crucial temporal collaborative signals, which are latent in evolving user-item interactions and coexist with sequential patterns. Therefore, we propose to unify sequential patterns and temporal collaborative signals to improve the quality of recommendation, which is rather challenging. Firstly, it is hard to simultaneously encode sequential patterns and collaborative signals. Secondly, it is non-trivial to express the temporal effects of collaborative signals. Hence, we design a new framework Temporal Graph Sequential Recommender (TGSRec) upon our defined continuous-time bi-partite graph. We propose a novel Temporal Collaborative Trans-former (TCT) layer in TGSRec, which advances the self-attention mechanism by adopting a novel collaborative attention. TCT layer can simultaneously capture collaborative signals from both users and items, as well as considering temporal dynamics inside sequential patterns. We propagate the information learned fromTCTlayerover the temporal graph to unify sequential patterns and temporal collaborative signals. Empirical results on five datasets show that TGSRec significantly outperforms other baselines, in average up to 22.5% and 22.1%absolute improvements in Recall@10and MRR, respectively.

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arXiv2021

Modeling Sequences as Distributions with Uncertainty for Sequential Recommendation

The sequential patterns within the user interactions are pivotal for representing the user's preference and capturing latent relationships among items. The recent advancements of sequence modeling by Transformers advocate the community to devise more effective encoders for the sequential recommendation. Most existing sequential methods assume users are deterministic. However, item-item transitions might fluctuate significantly in several item aspects and exhibit randomness of user interests. This \textit{stochastic characteristics} brings up a solid demand to include uncertainties in representing sequences and items. Additionally, modeling sequences and items with uncertainties expands users' and items' interaction spaces, thus further alleviating cold-start problems. In this work, we propose a Distribution-based Transformer for Sequential Recommendation (DT4SR), which injects uncertainties into sequential modeling. We use Elliptical Gaussian distributions to describe items and sequences with uncertainty. We describe the uncertainty in items and sequences as Elliptical Gaussian distribution. And we adopt Wasserstein distance to measure the similarity between distributions. We devise two novel Trans-formers for modeling mean and covariance, which guarantees the positive-definite property of distributions. The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The experiments on three benchmark datasets also demonstrate its effectiveness in alleviating cold-start issues. The code is available inhttps://github.com/DyGRec/DT4SR.

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arXiv2021

Augmenting Sequential Recommendation with Pseudo-Prior Items via Reversely Pre-training Transformer

Sequential Recommendation characterizes the evolving patterns by modeling item sequences chronologically. The essential target of it is to capture the item transition correlations. The recent developments of transformer inspire the community to design effective sequence encoders, \textit{e.g.,} SASRec and BERT4Rec. However, we observe that these transformer-based models suffer from the cold-start issue, \textit{i.e.,} performing poorly for short sequences. Therefore, we propose to augment short sequences while still preserving original sequential correlations. We introduce a new framework for \textbf{A}ugmenting \textbf{S}equential \textbf{Re}commendation with \textbf{P}seudo-prior items~(ASReP). We firstly pre-train a transformer with sequences in a reverse direction to predict prior items. Then, we use this transformer to generate fabricated historical items at the beginning of short sequences. Finally, we fine-tune the transformer using these augmented sequences from the time order to predict the next item. Experiments on two real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of ASReP. The code is available on \url{https://github.com/DyGRec/ASReP}.

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arXiv2020

Basket Recommendation with Multi-Intent Translation Graph Neural Network

The problem of basket recommendation~(BR) is to recommend a ranking list of items to the current basket. Existing methods solve this problem by assuming the items within the same basket are correlated by one semantic relation, thus optimizing the item embeddings. However, this assumption breaks when there exist multiple intents within a basket. For example, assuming a basket contains \{\textit{bread, cereal, yogurt, soap, detergent}\} where \{\textit{bread, cereal, yogurt}\} are correlated through the "breakfast" intent, while \{\textit{soap, detergent}\} are of "cleaning" intent, ignoring multiple relations among the items spoils the ability of the model to learn the embeddings. To resolve this issue, it is required to discover the intents within the basket. However, retrieving a multi-intent pattern is rather challenging, as intents are latent within the basket. Additionally, intents within the basket may also be correlated. Moreover, discovering a multi-intent pattern requires modeling high-order interactions, as the intents across different baskets are also correlated. To this end, we propose a new framework named as \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{I}ntent \textbf{T}ranslation \textbf{G}raph \textbf{N}eural \textbf{N}etwork~({\textbf{MITGNN}}). MITGNN models $T$ intents as tail entities translated from one corresponding basket embedding via $T$ relation vectors. The relation vectors are learned through multi-head aggregators to handle user and item information. Additionally, MITGNN propagates multiple intents across our defined basket graph to learn the embeddings of users and items by aggregating neighbors. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets prove the effectiveness of our proposed model on both transductive and inductive BR. The code is available online at https://github.com/JimLiu96/MITGNN.

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arXiv2020

Improving information retrieval from electronic health records using dynamic and multi-collaborative filtering

Due to the rapid growth of information available about individual patients, most physicians suffer from information overload when they review patient information in health information technology systems. In this manuscript, we present a novel hybrid dynamic and multi-collaborative filtering method to improve information retrieval from electronic health records. This method recommends relevant information from electronic health records for physicians during patient visits. It models information search dynamics using a Markov model. It also leverages the key idea of collaborative filtering, originating from Recommender Systems, to prioritize information based on various similarities among physicians, patients and information items. We tested this new method using real electronic health record data from the Indiana Network for Patient Care. Our experimental results demonstrated that for 46.7% of testing cases, this new method is able to correctly prioritize relevant information among top-5 recommendations that physicians are truly interested in.

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