There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

The modern science of networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of complex systems. One of the most relevant features of graphs representing real systems is community structure, or clustering, i. e. the organization of vertices in clusters, with many edges joining vertices of the same cluster and comparatively few edges joining vertices of different clusters. Such clusters, or communities, can be considered as fairly independent compartments of a graph, playing a similar role like, e. g., the tissues or the organs in the human body. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. This problem is very hard and not yet satisfactorily solved, despite the huge effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on it over the past few years. We will attempt a thorough exposition of the topic, from the definition of the main elements of the problem, to the presentation of most methods developed, with a special focus on techniques designed by statistical physicists, from the discussion of crucial issues like the significance of clustering and how methods should be tested and compared against each other, to the description of applications to real networks.

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Community detection in graphs

BIOE 402. Medical Technology Assessment. 2 or 3 hours. Bioentrepreneur course. Assessment of medical technology in the context of commercialization. Objectives, competition, market share, funding, pricing, manufacturing, growth, and intellectual property; many issues unique to biomedical products. Course Information: 2 undergraduate hours. 3 graduate hours. Prerequisite(s): Junior standing or above and consent of the instructor.

“Bioinformatics” 특집을 내면서

The primary premise upon which top-N recommender systems operate is that similar users are likely to have similar tastes with regard to their product choices. For this reason, recommender algorithms depend deeply on similarity metrics to build the recommendation lists for end-users.However, it has been noted that the products offered on recommendation lists are often too similar to each other and attention has been paid towards the goal of improving diversity to avoid monotonous recommendations.Noting that the retrieval of a set of items matching a user query is a common problem across many applications of information retrieval, we model the competing goals of maximizing the diversity of the retrieved list while maintaining adequate similarity to the user query as a binary optimization problem. We explore a solution strategy to this optimization problem by relaxing it to a trust-region problem.This leads to a parameterized eigenvalue problem whose solution is finally quantized to the required binary solution. We apply this approach to the top-N prediction problem, evaluate the system performance on the Movielens dataset and compare it with a standard item-based top-N algorithm. A new evaluation metric ItemNovelty is proposed in this work. Improvements on both diversity and accuracy are obtained compared to the benchmark algorithm.

Avoiding monotony: improving the diversity of recommendation lists

Collaborative recommendation has emerged as an effective technique for personalized information access. However, there has been relatively little theoretical analysis of the conditions under which the technique is effective. To explore this issue, we analyse the robustness of collaborative recommendation: the ability to make recommendations despite (possibly intentional) noisy product ratings. There are two aspects to robustness: recommendation accuracy and stability. We formalize recommendation accuracy in machine learning terms and develop theoretically justified models of accuracy. In addition, we present a framework to examine recommendation stability in the context of a widely-used collaborative filtering algorithm. For each case, we evaluate our analysis using several real-world data-sets. Our investigation is both practically relevant for enterprises wondering whether collaborative recommendation leaves their marketing operations open to attack, and theoretically interesting for the light it sheds on a comprehensive theory of collaborative recommendation.

Collaborative recommendation: A robustness analysis

For recommender systems that base their product rankings primarily on a measure of similarity between items and the user query, it can often happen that products on the recommendation list are highly similar to each other and lack diversity. In this article we argue that the motivation of diversity research is to increase the probability of retrieving unusual or novel items which are relevant to the user and introduce a methodology to evaluate their performance in terms of novel item retrieval. Moreover, noting that the retrieval of a set of items matching a user query is a common problem across many applications of information retrieval, we formulate the trade-off between diversity and matching quality as a binary optimization problem, with an input control parameter allowing explicit tuning of this trade-off. We study solution strategies to the optimization problem and demonstrate the importance of the control parameter in obtaining desired system performance. The methods are evaluated for collaborative recommendation using two datasets and case-based recommendation using a synthetic dataset constructed from the public-domain Travel dataset.

Novelty and Diversity in Top-N Recommendation -- Analysis and Evaluation

In complex networks it is common for each node to belong to several communities, implying a highly overlapping community structure. Recent advances in benchmarking indicate that the existing community assignment algorithms that are capable of detecting overlapping communities perform well only when the extent of community overlap is kept to modest levels. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new community assignment algorithm called Greedy Clique Expansion (GCE). The algorithm identifies distinct cliques as seeds and expands these seeds by greedily optimizing a local fitness function. We perform extensive benchmarks on synthetic data to demonstrate that GCE’s good performance is robust across diverse graph topologies. Significantly, GCE is the only algorithm to perform well on these synthetic graphs, in which every node belongs to multiple communities. Furthermore, when put to the task of identifying functional modules in protein interaction data, and college dorm assignments in Facebook friendship data, we find that GCE performs competitively.

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Detecting highly overlapping community structure by greedy clique expansion

Novelty and diversity have been identified, along with accuracy, as foremost properties of useful recommendations. Considerable progress has been made in the field in terms of the definition of methods to enhance such properties, as well as methodologies and metrics to assess how well such methods work. In this chapter we give an overview of the main contributions to this area in the field of recommender systems, and seek to relate them together in a unified view, analyzing the common elements underneath the different forms under which novelty and diversity have been addressed, and identifying connections to closely related work on diversity in other fields.

Neil Hurley

Papers

Avoiding monotony: improving the diversity of recommendation lists

Collaborative recommendation: A robustness analysis

Novelty and Diversity in Top-N Recommendation -- Analysis and Evaluation

Detecting highly overlapping community structure by greedy clique expansion

Novelty and Diversity in Recommender Systems