what does "weight scheme" mean in Recommender system - recommendation-engine

I read different papers in hybrid recommender system
and in case of combining the prediction the usually use "weight scheme"
what does it mean ?
is it related to Data Normalization ?
I would like to know because I want to develop a hybrid recommender system by combining prediction from two recommender system
Thank u
HERE IS THE resources that I read
resources1
resources1

Each of your recommender systems make a numeric prediction, let's call them x and y. To come up with a single prediction though we need to combine these two values in some way. The most simple way is to add them together. However, since each recommender system might make predictions on a different scale (0-1 or 0-10 for example), we also need to weight each value.
Let's say we weight x by weight a, and y by weight b, then we have the weighting scheme:
prediction = (a*x) + (b*y)

Related

how to compare two hyper parameters in a hierarchical model?

In one hierarchical model, we have two hyer parameters: dnorm(A_mu, 0.25^-2) and dnorm (B_mu, 0.25^-2). In this case, 0.25 is the sd, I use the fixed number. A_mu and B_mu represent the mean of group level. After fitting the data by rjags, we get the distributions for each parameter. So I just directly compare the highest posterior density interval (HDI) of A_mu and B_mu? Do I need to calculate something using the sd(0.25)?
In another case, if the sd of two hyper parameters is not fixed, like that: dnorm(A_mu, A_sd) and dnorm (B_mu, B_sd). How can I compare the two hyper parameters and make a decision, e.g. this group is significantly different another group?
Remember that you are getting posterior distributions for A_mu and B_mu. This makes your comparison easy as you can have a look at 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the parameters (or pick a confidence value that satisfies your needs). I believe JAGS uses Gibbs sampling and so you should be able to get the raw samples from the posteriors for A_mu and B_mu. You can then ask "what is the probability that B_mu is greater than some value?" by calculating the percentage of posterior samples that are greater than that value. Alternatively, and in a similar way to frequentist Hypothesis testing, you can ask what is the probability that the mean of B_mu is a draw from the posterior of A_mu. So the key is just to directly use the samples from your posterior. I would recommend taking a look at Andrew Gelman's BDA3 textbook (Chapter 4) for a really good reference on these concepts.
A few things to keep in mind before drawing conclusions from the data: (1) you should always check the validity of your Markov Chains by evaluating things like autocorrelation (2) try to do a posterior predictive check to make sure your model is well fit to the data. If your model is poorly fit to the data then you can get very misleading results from the procedure above.

Decision Level Fusion of SVR outputs

I have two sets of features predicting the same outputs. But instead of training everything at once, I would like to train them separately and fuse the decisions. In SVM classification, we can take the probability values for the classes which can be used to train another SVM. But in SVR, how can we do this?
Any ideas?
Thanks :)
There are a couple of choices here . The two most popular ones would be:
ONE)
Build the two models and simply average the results.
It tends to work well in practice.
TWO)
You could do it in a very similar fashion as when you have probabilities. The problem is, you need to control for over fitting .What I mean is that it is "dangerous" to produce a score with one set of features and apply to another where the labels are exactly the same as before (even if the new features are different). This is because the new applied score was trained on these labels and therefore over fits in it (hyper-performs).
Normally you use a Cross-validation
In your case you have
train_set_1 with X1 features and label Y
train_set_2 with X2 features and same label Y
Some psedo code:
randomly split 50-50 both train_set_1 and train_set_2 at exactly the same points along with the Y (output array)
so now you have:
a.train_set_1 (50% of training_set_1)
b.train_set_1 (the rest of 50% of training_set_1)
a.train_set_2 (50% of training_set_2)
b.train_set_2 (the rest of 50% of training_set_2)
a.Y (50% of the output array that corresponds to the same sets as a.train_set_1 and a.train_set_2)
b.Y (50% of the output array that corresponds to the same sets as b.train_set_1 and b.train_set_2)
here is the key part
Build a svr with a.train_set_1 (that contains X1 features) and output a.Y and
Apply that model's prediction as a feature to b.train_set_2 .
By this I mean, you score the b.train_set_2 base on your first model. Then you take this score and paste it next to your a.train_set_2 .So now this set will have X2 features + 1 more feature, the score produced by the first model.
Then build your final model on b.train_set_2 and b.Y
The new model , although uses the score produced from training_set_1, still it does so in an unbiased way , since the later was never trained on these labels!
You might also find this paper quite useful

Matlab: K-means clustering with predefined populations

I am trying to differentiate two populations. Each population is an NxM matrix in which N is fixed between the two and M is variable in length (N=column specific attributes of each run, M=run number). I have looked at PCA and K-means for differentiating the two, but I was curious of the best practice.
To my knowledge, in K-means, there is no initial 'calibration' in which the clusters are chosen such that known bimodal populations can be differentiated. It simply minimizes the distance and assigns the data to an arbitrary number of populations. I would like to tell the clustering algorithm that I want the best fit in which the two populations are separated. I can then use the fit I get from the initial clustering on future datasets. Any help, example code, or reading material would be appreciated.
-R
K-means and PCA are typically used in unsupervised learning problems, i.e. problems where you have a single batch of data and want to find some easier way to describe it. In principle, you could run K-means (with K=2) on your data, and then evaluate the degree to which your two classes of data match up with the data clusters found by this algorithm (note: you may want multiple starts).
It sounds to like you have a supervised learning problem: you have a training data set which has already been partitioned into two classes. In this case k-nearest neighbors (as mentioned by #amas) is probably the approach most like k-means; however Support Vector Machines can also be an attractive approach.
I frequently refer to The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Springer Series in Statistics) by Trevor Hastie (Author), Robert Tibshirani (Author), Jerome Friedman (Author).
It really depends on the data. But just to let you know K-means does get stuck at local minima so if you wanna use it try running it from different random starting points. PCA's might also be useful how ever like any other spectral clustering method you have much less control over the clustering procedure. I recommend that you cluster the data using k-means with multiple random starting points and c how it works then you can predict and learn for each the new samples with K-NN (I don't know if it is useful for your case).
Check Lazy learners and K-NN for prediction.

Principal component analysis

I have to write a classificator (gaussian mixture model) that I use for human action recognition.
I have 4 dataset of video. I choose 3 of them as training set and 1 of them as testing set.
Before I apply the gm model on the training set I run the pca on it.
pca_coeff=princomp(trainig_data);
score = training_data * pca_coeff;
training_data = score(:,1:min(size(score,2),numDimension));
During the testing step what should I do? Should I execute a new princomp on testing data
new_pca_coeff=princomp(testing_data);
score = testing_data * new_pca_coeff;
testing_data = score(:,1:min(size(score,2),numDimension));
or I should use the pca_coeff that I compute for the training data?
score = testing_data * pca_coeff;
testing_data = score(:,1:min(size(score,2),numDimension));
The classifier is being trained on data in the space defined by the principle components of the training data. It doesn't make sense to evaluate it in a different space - therefore, you should apply the same transformation to testing data as you did to training data, so don't compute a different pca_coef.
Incidently, if your testing data is drawn independently from the same distribution as the training data, then for large enough training and test sets, the principle components should be approximately the same.
One method for choosing how many principle components to use involves examining the eigenvalues from the PCA decomposition. You can get these from the princomp function like this:
[pca_coeff score eigenvalues] = princomp(data);
The eigenvalues variable will then be an array where each element describes the amount of variance accounted for by the corresponding principle component. If you do:
plot(eigenvalues);
you should see that the first eigenvalue will be the largest, and they will rapidly decrease (this is called a "Scree Plot", and should look like this: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/SPSS/output/spss_output_pca_5.gif, though your one may have up to 800 points instead of 12).
Principle components with small corresponding eigenvalues are unlikely to be useful, since the variance of the data in those dimensions is so small. Many people choose a threshold value, and then select all principle components where the eigenvalue is above that threshold. An informal way of picking the threshold is to look at the Scree plot and choose the threshold to be just after the line 'levels out' - in the image I linked earlier, a good value might be ~0.8, selecting 3 or 4 principle components.
IIRC, you could do something like:
proportion_of_variance = sum(eigenvalues(1:k)) ./ sum(eigenvalues);
to calculate "the proportion of variance described by the low dimensional data".
However, since you are using the principle components for a classification task, you can't really be sure that any particular number of PCs is optimal; the variance of a feature doesn't necessarily tell you anything about how useful it will be for classification. An alternative to choosing PCs with the Scree plot is just to try classification with various numbers of principle components and see what the best number is empirically.

Clustering: a training dataset of variable data dimensions

I have a dataset of n data, where each data is represented by a set of extracted features. Generally, the clustering algorithms need that all input data have the same dimensions (the same number of features), that is, the input data X is a n*d matrix of n data points each of which has d features.
In my case, I've previously extracted some features from my data but the number of extracted features for each data is most likely to be different (I mean, I have a dataset X where data points have not the same number of features).
Is there any way to adapt them, in order to cluster them using some common clustering algorithms requiring data to be of the same dimensions.
Thanks
Sounds like the problem you have is that it's a 'sparse' data set. There are generally two options.
Reduce the dimensionality of the input data set using multi-dimensional scaling techniques. For example Sparse SVD (e.g. Lanczos algorithm) or sparse PCA. Then apply traditional clustering on the dense lower dimensional outputs.
Directly apply a sparse clustering algorithm, such as sparse k-mean. Note you can probably find a PDF of this paper if you look hard enough online (try scholar.google.com).
[Updated after problem clarification]
In the problem, a handwritten word is analyzed visually for connected components (lines). For each component, a fixed number of multi-dimensional features is extracted. We need to cluster the words, each of which may have one or more connected components.
Suggested solution:
Classify the connected components first, into 1000(*) unique component classifications. Then classify the words against the classified components they contain (a sparse problem described above).
*Note, the exact number of component classifications you choose doesn't really matter as long as it's high enough as the MDS analysis will reduce them to the essential 'orthogonal' classifications.
There are also clustering algorithms such as DBSCAN that in fact do not care about your data. All this algorithm needs is a distance function. So if you can specify a distance function for your features, then you can use DBSCAN (or OPTICS, which is an extension of DBSCAN, that doesn't need the epsilon parameter).
So the key question here is how you want to compare your features. This doesn't have much to do with clustering, and is highly domain dependant. If your features are e.g. word occurrences, Cosine distance is a good choice (using 0s for non-present features). But if you e.g. have a set of SIFT keypoints extracted from a picture, there is no obvious way to relate the different features with each other efficiently, as there is no order to the features (so one could compare the first keypoint with the first keypoint etc.) A possible approach here is to derive another - uniform - set of features. Typically, bag of words features are used for such a situation. For images, this is also known as visual words. Essentially, you first cluster the sub-features to obtain a limited vocabulary. Then you can assign each of the original objects a "text" composed of these "words" and use a distance function such as cosine distance on them.
I see two options here:
Restrict yourself to those features for which all your data-points have a value.
See if you can generate sensible default values for missing features.
However, if possible, you should probably resample all your data-points, so that they all have values for all features.