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In this paper, we propose a listwise approach for constructing user-specific rankings in recommendation systems in a collaborative fashion. We contrast the listwise approach to previous pointwise and pairwise approaches, which are based on treating either each rating or each pairwise comparison as an independent instance respectively. By extending the work of (Cao et al. 2007), we cast listwise collaborative ranking as maximum likelihood under a permutation model which applies probability mass to permutations based on a low rank latent score matrix. We present a novel algorithm called SQL-Rank, which can accommodate ties and missing data and can run in linear time. We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing listwise ranking methods based on a novel representation theory for the permutation model. Applying this framework to collaborative ranking, we derive asymptotic statistical rates as the number of users and items grow together. We conclude by demonstrating that our SQL-Rank method often outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms for implicit feedback such as Weighted-MF and BPR and achieve favorable results when compared to explicit feedback algorithms such as matrix factorization and collaborative ranking.
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Arsm Gradient Estimator for Supervised Learning to Rank
We propose a new model for supervised learning to rank. In our model, the relevance labels are assumed to follow a categorical distribution whose probabilities are constructed based on a scoring function. We optimize the training objective with respect to the multivariate categorical variables with an unbiased and low-variance gradient estimator. Learning-to-rank methods can generally be categorized into pointwise, pairwise, and listwise approaches. Although our scoring function is pointwise, the proposed framework permits flexibility over the choice of the loss function. In our new model, the loss function need not be differentiable and can either be pointwise or listwise. Our proposed method achieves better or comparable results on two datasets compared with existing pairwise and listwise methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1812641
- PAR ID:
- 10158844
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The 45th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2020)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3157 to 3161
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9053127
