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Steffen Rendle

Bio: Steffen Rendle is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Recommender system & Ranking (information retrieval). The author has an hindex of 28, co-authored 66 publications receiving 11314 citations. Previous affiliations of Steffen Rendle include University of Konstanz & University of Hildesheim.


Papers
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Proceedings Article
18 Jun 2009
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a generic optimization criterion BPR-Opt for personalized ranking that is the maximum posterior estimator derived from a Bayesian analysis of the problem, which is based on stochastic gradient descent with bootstrap sampling.
Abstract: Item recommendation is the task of predicting a personalized ranking on a set of items (e.g. websites, movies, products). In this paper, we investigate the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g. clicks, purchases). There are many methods for item recommendation from implicit feedback like matrix factorization (MF) or adaptive k-nearest-neighbor (kNN). Even though these methods are designed for the item prediction task of personalized ranking, none of them is directly optimized for ranking. In this paper we present a generic optimization criterion BPR-Opt for personalized ranking that is the maximum posterior estimator derived from a Bayesian analysis of the problem. We also provide a generic learning algorithm for optimizing models with respect to BPR-Opt. The learning method is based on stochastic gradient descent with bootstrap sampling. We show how to apply our method to two state-of-the-art recommender models: matrix factorization and adaptive kNN. Our experiments indicate that for the task of personalized ranking our optimization method outperforms the standard learning techniques for MF and kNN. The results show the importance of optimizing models for the right criterion.

3,429 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
13 Dec 2010
TL;DR: Factorization Machines (FM) are introduced which are a new model class that combines the advantages of Support Vector Machines (SVM) with factorization models and can mimic these models just by specifying the input data (i.e. the feature vectors).
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Factorization Machines (FM) which are a new model class that combines the advantages of Support Vector Machines (SVM) with factorization models. Like SVMs, FMs are a general predictor working with any real valued feature vector. In contrast to SVMs, FMs model all interactions between variables using factorized parameters. Thus they are able to estimate interactions even in problems with huge sparsity (like recommender systems) where SVMs fail. We show that the model equation of FMs can be calculated in linear time and thus FMs can be optimized directly. So unlike nonlinear SVMs, a transformation in the dual form is not necessary and the model parameters can be estimated directly without the need of any support vector in the solution. We show the relationship to SVMs and the advantages of FMs for parameter estimation in sparse settings. On the other hand there are many different factorization models like matrix factorization, parallel factor analysis or specialized models like SVD++, PITF or FPMC. The drawback of these models is that they are not applicable for general prediction tasks but work only with special input data. Furthermore their model equations and optimization algorithms are derived individually for each task. We show that FMs can mimic these models just by specifying the input data (i.e. the feature vectors). This makes FMs easily applicable even for users without expert knowledge in factorization models.

2,460 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
26 Apr 2010
TL;DR: This paper introduces an adaption of the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) framework for sequential basket data and shows that the FPMC model outperforms both the common matrix factorization and the unpersonalized MC model both learned with and without factorization.
Abstract: Recommender systems are an important component of many websites. Two of the most popular approaches are based on matrix factorization (MF) and Markov chains (MC). MF methods learn the general taste of a user by factorizing the matrix over observed user-item preferences. On the other hand, MC methods model sequential behavior by learning a transition graph over items that is used to predict the next action based on the recent actions of a user. In this paper, we present a method bringing both approaches together. Our method is based on personalized transition graphs over underlying Markov chains. That means for each user an own transition matrix is learned - thus in total the method uses a transition cube. As the observations for estimating the transitions are usually very limited, our method factorizes the transition cube with a pairwise interaction model which is a special case of the Tucker Decomposition. We show that our factorized personalized MC (FPMC) model subsumes both a common Markov chain and the normal matrix factorization model. For learning the model parameters, we introduce an adaption of the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) framework for sequential basket data. Empirically, we show that our FPMC model outperforms both the common matrix factorization and the unpersonalized MC model both learned with and without factorization.

1,788 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The libFM as mentioned in this paper tool is a software implementation for factorization machines that features stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and alternating least-squares (ALS) optimization, as well as Bayesian inference using Markov Chain Monto Carlo (MCMC).
Abstract: Factorization approaches provide high accuracy in several important prediction problems, for example, recommender systems. However, applying factorization approaches to a new prediction problem is a nontrivial task and requires a lot of expert knowledge. Typically, a new model is developed, a learning algorithm is derived, and the approach has to be implemented.Factorization machines (FM) are a generic approach since they can mimic most factorization models just by feature engineering. This way, factorization machines combine the generality of feature engineering with the superiority of factorization models in estimating interactions between categorical variables of large domain. libFM is a software implementation for factorization machines that features stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and alternating least-squares (ALS) optimization, as well as Bayesian inference using Markov Chain Monto Carlo (MCMC). This article summarizes the recent research on factorization machines both in terms of modeling and learning, provides extensions for the ALS and MCMC algorithms, and describes the software tool libFM.

1,271 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: This paper presents a generic optimization criterion BPR-Opt for personalized ranking that is the maximum posterior estimator derived from a Bayesian analysis of the problem and provides a generic learning algorithm for optimizing models with respect to B PR-Opt.
Abstract: Item recommendation is the task of predicting a personalized ranking on a set of items (e.g. websites, movies, products). In this paper, we investigate the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g. clicks, purchases). There are many methods for item recommendation from implicit feedback like matrix factorization (MF) or adaptive knearest-neighbor (kNN). Even though these methods are designed for the item prediction task of personalized ranking, none of them is directly optimized for ranking. In this paper we present a generic optimization criterion BPR-Opt for personalized ranking that is the maximum posterior estimator derived from a Bayesian analysis of the problem. We also provide a generic learning algorithm for optimizing models with respect to BPR-Opt. The learning method is based on stochastic gradient descent with bootstrap sampling. We show how to apply our method to two state-of-the-art recommender models: matrix factorization and adaptive kNN. Our experiments indicate that for the task of personalized ranking our optimization method outperforms the standard learning techniques for MF and kNN. The results show the importance of optimizing models for the right criterion.

1,134 citations


Cited by
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
03 Apr 2017
TL;DR: This work strives to develop techniques based on neural networks to tackle the key problem in recommendation --- collaborative filtering --- on the basis of implicit feedback, and presents a general framework named NCF, short for Neural network-based Collaborative Filtering.
Abstract: In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded immense success on speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the exploration of deep neural networks on recommender systems has received relatively less scrutiny. In this work, we strive to develop techniques based on neural networks to tackle the key problem in recommendation --- collaborative filtering --- on the basis of implicit feedback. Although some recent work has employed deep learning for recommendation, they primarily used it to model auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and acoustic features of musics. When it comes to model the key factor in collaborative filtering --- the interaction between user and item features, they still resorted to matrix factorization and applied an inner product on the latent features of users and items. By replacing the inner product with a neural architecture that can learn an arbitrary function from data, we present a general framework named NCF, short for Neural network-based Collaborative Filtering. NCF is generic and can express and generalize matrix factorization under its framework. To supercharge NCF modelling with non-linearities, we propose to leverage a multi-layer perceptron to learn the user-item interaction function. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show significant improvements of our proposed NCF framework over the state-of-the-art methods. Empirical evidence shows that using deeper layers of neural networks offers better recommendation performance.

4,419 citations

Proceedings Article
18 Jun 2009
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a generic optimization criterion BPR-Opt for personalized ranking that is the maximum posterior estimator derived from a Bayesian analysis of the problem, which is based on stochastic gradient descent with bootstrap sampling.
Abstract: Item recommendation is the task of predicting a personalized ranking on a set of items (e.g. websites, movies, products). In this paper, we investigate the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g. clicks, purchases). There are many methods for item recommendation from implicit feedback like matrix factorization (MF) or adaptive k-nearest-neighbor (kNN). Even though these methods are designed for the item prediction task of personalized ranking, none of them is directly optimized for ranking. In this paper we present a generic optimization criterion BPR-Opt for personalized ranking that is the maximum posterior estimator derived from a Bayesian analysis of the problem. We also provide a generic learning algorithm for optimizing models with respect to BPR-Opt. The learning method is based on stochastic gradient descent with bootstrap sampling. We show how to apply our method to two state-of-the-art recommender models: matrix factorization and adaptive kNN. Our experiments indicate that for the task of personalized ranking our optimization method outperforms the standard learning techniques for MF and kNN. The results show the importance of optimizing models for the right criterion.

3,429 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
13 Dec 2010
TL;DR: Factorization Machines (FM) are introduced which are a new model class that combines the advantages of Support Vector Machines (SVM) with factorization models and can mimic these models just by specifying the input data (i.e. the feature vectors).
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Factorization Machines (FM) which are a new model class that combines the advantages of Support Vector Machines (SVM) with factorization models. Like SVMs, FMs are a general predictor working with any real valued feature vector. In contrast to SVMs, FMs model all interactions between variables using factorized parameters. Thus they are able to estimate interactions even in problems with huge sparsity (like recommender systems) where SVMs fail. We show that the model equation of FMs can be calculated in linear time and thus FMs can be optimized directly. So unlike nonlinear SVMs, a transformation in the dual form is not necessary and the model parameters can be estimated directly without the need of any support vector in the solution. We show the relationship to SVMs and the advantages of FMs for parameter estimation in sparse settings. On the other hand there are many different factorization models like matrix factorization, parallel factor analysis or specialized models like SVD++, PITF or FPMC. The drawback of these models is that they are not applicable for general prediction tasks but work only with special input data. Furthermore their model equations and optimization algorithms are derived individually for each task. We show that FMs can mimic these models just by specifying the input data (i.e. the feature vectors). This makes FMs easily applicable even for users without expert knowledge in factorization models.

2,460 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
15 Sep 2016
TL;DR: Wide & Deep learning is presented---jointly trained wide linear models and deep neural networks---to combine the benefits of memorization and generalization for recommender systems and is open-sourced in TensorFlow.
Abstract: Generalized linear models with nonlinear feature transformations are widely used for large-scale regression and classification problems with sparse inputs. Memorization of feature interactions through a wide set of cross-product feature transformations are effective and interpretable, while generalization requires more feature engineering effort. With less feature engineering, deep neural networks can generalize better to unseen feature combinations through low-dimensional dense embeddings learned for the sparse features. However, deep neural networks with embeddings can over-generalize and recommend less relevant items when the user-item interactions are sparse and high-rank. In this paper, we present Wide & Deep learning---jointly trained wide linear models and deep neural networks---to combine the benefits of memorization and generalization for recommender systems. We productionized and evaluated the system on Google Play, a commercial mobile app store with over one billion active users and over one million apps. Online experiment results show that Wide & Deep significantly increased app acquisitions compared with wide-only and deep-only models. We have also open-sourced our implementation in TensorFlow.

2,454 citations