For SVD based algorithms, you would should use the AllUnknownItems Strategy then, thats correct.

In the majority of industry usecases that I have seen, people use pre-computed item similarities (Mahout has lots of machinery for doing this, btw), so AllSimilarItems totally makes sense there.

--sebastian

On 03/05/2014 06:01 PM, Tevfik Aytekin wrote:
It can even make things worse in SVD-based algorithms for which
preference estimation is very fast.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 7:00 PM, Tevfik Aytekin <tevfik.ayte...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Sebastian,
But in order not to select items that is not similar to at least one
of the items the user interacted with you have to compute the
similarity with all user items (which is the main task for estimating
the preference of an item in item-based method). So, it seems to me
that AllSimilarItemsStrategy does not bring much advantage over
AllUnknownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 6:46 PM, Sebastian Schelter <s...@apache.org> wrote:
So both strategies seems to be effectively the same, I don't know what
the implementers had in mind when designing
AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy.

It can take a long time to estimate preferences for all items a user doesn't
know. Especially if you have a lot of items. Traditional item-based
recommenders will not recommend any item that is not similar to at least one
of the items the user interacted with, so AllSimilarItemsStrategy already
selects the maximum set of items that could be potentially recommended to
the user.

--sebastian




On 03/05/2014 05:38 PM, Tevfik Aytekin wrote:

If the similarity between item 5 and two of the items user 1 preferred are
not
NaN then it will return 1, that is what I'm saying. If the
similarities were all NaN then
it will not return it.

But surely, you might wonder if all similarities between an item and
user's items are NaN, then
AllUnknownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy probably will not return it.


On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Juan José Ramos <jjar...@gmail.com> wrote:

@Tevfik, running this recommender:

GenericItemBasedRecommender itemRecommender = new
GenericItemBasedRecommender(dataModel, itemSimilarity, new
AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy(itemSimilarity), new
AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy(itemSimilarity));


With this dataModel:
1,1,1.0
1,2,2.0
1,3,1.0
1,4,2.0
2,1,1.0
2,2,4.0


And these similarities
1,2,0.1
1,3,0.2
1,4,0.3
2,3,0.5
3,4,0.5
5,1,0.2
5,2,1.0

Returns item 5 for User 1. So item 5 has not been preferred by user 1,
and
the similarity between item 5 and two of the items user 1 preferred are
not
NaN, but AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy is returning that item.
So,
I'm truly sorry to insist on this, but I still really do not get the
difference.


On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 2:53 PM, Tevfik Aytekin
<tevfik.ayte...@gmail.com>wrote:

Juan,
You got me wrong,

AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy

returns all items that have not been rated by the user and the
similarity metric returns a non-NaN similarity value with at
least one of the items preferred by the user.

So, it does not simply return all items that have not been rated by
the user. For example, if there is an item X which has not been rated
by the user and if the similarity value between X and at least one of
the items rated (preferred) by the user is not NaN, then X will be not
be returned by AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy, but it will be
returned by AllUnknownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy.



On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Juan José Ramos <jjar...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Hi Tefik,

Thanks for the response. I think what you says contradicts what
Sebastian
pointed out before. Also, if AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy

returns

all items that have not been rated by the user, what would
AllUnknownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy return?


On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Tevfik Aytekin
<tevfik.ayte...@gmail.com
wrote:

Sorry there was a typo in the previous paragraph.

If I remember correctly, AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy

returns all items that have not been rated by the user and the
similarity metric returns a non-NaN similarity value with at
least one of the items preferred by the user.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 3:38 PM, Tevfik Aytekin <

tevfik.ayte...@gmail.com>

wrote:

Hi Juan,

If I remember correctly, AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy

returns all items that have not been rated by the user and the
similarity metric returns a non-NaN similarity value that is with at
least one of the items preferred by the user.

Tevfik

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Sebastian Schelter <s...@apache.org>

wrote:

On 03/05/2014 01:23 PM, Juan José Ramos wrote:


Thanks for the reply, Sebastian.

I am not sure if that should be implemented in the Abstract base

class

though because for
instance PreferredItemsNeighborhoodCandidateItemsStrategy, by

definition,

it returns the item not rated by the user and rated by somebody

else.



Good point. So we seem to need special implementations.



Back to my last post, I have been playing around with
AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy
and AllUnknownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy, and although they both
do

what

I
wanted (recommend items not previously rated by any user), I

honestly

can't
tell the difference between the two strategies. In my tests the

output

was

always the same. If the eventual output of the recommender will not
include
items already rated by the user as pointed out here (




http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/mahout-user/201403.mbox/%3CCABHkCkuv35dbwF%2B9sK88FR3hg7MAcdv0MP10v-5QWEvwmNdY%2BA%40mail.gmail.com%3E

),

AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy should be equivalent to
AllUnkownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy, shouldn't it?



AllSimilarItems returns all items that are similar to any item that

the

user

already knows. AllUnknownItems simply returns all items that the
user

has

not interacted with yet.

These are two different things, although they might overlap in some
scenarios.

Best,
Sebastian




Thanks.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 10:23 AM, Sebastian Schelter <s...@apache.org


wrote:



Hi Juan,

that is a good catch. CandidateItemsStrategy is the right place to


implement this. Maybe we should simply extend its interface to add
a
parameter that says whether to keep or remove the current users

items?



We could even do this in the abstract base class then.

--sebastian


On 03/05/2014 10:42 AM, Juan José Ramos wrote:



In case somebody runs into the same situation, the key seems to

be in

the
CandidateItemStrategy being passed to the constructor
of GenericItemBasedRecommender. Looking into the code, if no
CandidateItemStrategy is specified in the
constructor, PreferredItemsNeighborhoodCandidateItemsStrategy is

used

and
as the documentation says, the doGetCandidateItems method:

"returns

all

items that have not been rated by the user and that were

preferred by

another user that has preferred at least one item that the
current

user


has


preferred too".

So, a different CandidateItemStrategy needs to be passed. For
this


problem,


it seems to me that AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy,
AllUnknownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy are good candidates. Does

anybody

know where to find some documentation about the different
CandidateItemStrategy? Based on the name I would say that:
1) AllSimilarItemsCandidateItemsStrategy returns all similar
items
regardless of whether they have been already rated by someone or

not.

2) AllUnknownItemsCandidateItemsStrategy returns all similar
items

that

have not been rated by anyone yet.

Does anybody know if it works like that?
Thanks.


On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 9:16 AM, Juan José Ramos <

jjar...@gmail.com>


wrote:



First thing is thatI know this requirement would not make sense

in

a CF

Recommender. In my case, I am trying to use Mahout to create

something

closer to a Content-Based Recommender.

In particular, I am pre-computing a similarity matrix between
all

the

documents (items) of my catalogue and using that matrix as the
ItemSimilarity for my Item-Based Recommender.

So, when a user rates a document, how could I make the

recommender


outputs


similar documents to that ones the user has already rated even

if no


other


user in the system has rated them yet? Is that even possible in

the


first


place?

Thanks a lot.









Reply via email to