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Content-Based Filtering Recommendation Algorithm Using HMM

Conference Paper · August 2012

DOI: 10.1109/ICCIS.2012.112

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 2012 Fourth International Conference on Computational and Information Sciences

Content-Based Filtering Recommendation Algorithm Using HMM

Hui Li Fei Cai Zhifang Liao

School of Software School of Software School of Software
Central South University Central South University Central South University
Changsha, China Changsha, China Changsha, China
fzlihui@gmail.com csucaifei@126.com zhifang.liao@gmail.com

Abstract—In this paper, we combine probabilistic model and
classical content-based filtering recommendation algorithms to
propose a new algorithm for recommendation system, which we
call content-based filtering recommendation algorithm using
HMM. We utilize the HMM of recommended items to match user
model and recommend items using user data. According to
experiment result, this new method is more effective on
describing a user’s interest compared with the VSM-based
algorithm.
Keywords-HMM; content-based filtering; recommendation system
I. INTRODUCTION
The rapid development of internet brings the problem of
information overload: user receives too much potential
similarity of user profile and each profile of all the items and
recommends items may satisfy user need or tastes.
Combining the feature of items and the user interest model,
the utility function is usually defined as:
u (c, s ) = score(ContentBaseProfile(c), Content ( s))
There are many methods to calculate the utility, for
example, the cosine similarity measure:
JJG JJJG
JJJG JJG w ⋅w s
u (c , s ) = cos( w c , w s ) = JJJG c JJG
w c × ws

¦
valuable information to approach the most useful part, which k
causes the reducing of efficiency [1]. Recently, many wi , c wi , s
applications of network (web portal, search engine, data index, = i =1

¦ ¦
k k
etc.) help users filter the information. However, all of these
methods just satisfy the basic needs and do not consider the
( i =1
w i2, c i =1
w i2, s )
personalized services to solve the information overload
problem. As an important method of information filter, Finally, the system sorts items by the utility values and
recommendation system provides personalized services to recommend other items to that user which have a high degree
users through identifying and predicting user preferences and of similarity to the user’s profile.
become a most useful method helping user to deal with III. HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL
information overload [2].
The most typical application of recommendation system is The basic theory of hidden Markov model was published
in the e-commerce which has a promising development in a series of classic papers by Baum and his colleagues in the
prospect. The online mall can recommend customers products, late 1960s and early 1970s and was firstly applied in speech
which may attract their attention or satisfy their needs (such as processing applications in the middle of 1970s [4]. From then
books, video, etc.), according to the users’ interests. It can on, HMM has been widely implemented in many fields.
enhance the products sales by meeting the potential needs of HMM is a probabilistic statistical model. A discrete hidden
users, which are usually not clear and fuzzy. Recommendation Markov model contains a set of states and an alphabet of
systems have become extremely common in recent years. output symbols [4]. States can both transform from one to the
Almost all of the large e-business systems have applied other and emit several output symbols. The probabilities of the
recommendation system in different ways, such as Amazon, two procedures make up the transition distributions over states
eBay, etc. and the emission distributions over the output symbols
respectively.
II. CONTENT-BASED FILTERING ALGORITHM A discrete hidden Markov model can be characteristically
The content-based recommendation algorithms derive defined as:
from information retrieval and filtering research [3]. The
content-based recommendation is the continuation and • A set of hidden states Q = {Q , Q ,!, Q } , where
development of early collaborative filtering method. Content- 1 2 N
based recommendation systems recommend items similar to Q (1 < t < N ) is the state in time t.
those that the user has selected in the past rather than the user’s t
comments of items. Many current content-based systems build • A set of output symbols X = { X , X ,! , X }
the users’ profile and items’ profile. A user profile contains 1 2 M
information about user’s tastes, preferences and needs which emitted by each hidden states.
can be elicited from users’ questionnaires or learned from their
transactional behavior over time, while an item profile contains • The probabilities distribution of state transitions:
a set of attributes of items. Then the system calculates the

978-0-7695-4789-3/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE 275

DOI 10.1109/ICCIS.2012.112
 A = {a }, a = P[Q | Q ],1 ≤ i, j ≤ N .
ij ij j i
• The probabilities distribution of emitting output
symbols in state j :
B = {b (k )}, b (k ) = P[ X | Q ],1 ≤ j ≤ N ,1 ≤ k ≤ M
j j k j
• Initial state probabilities distribution:
π = {π }, π = P[Q ],1 ≤ i ≤ N .
i i i
The parameter of HMM can be simply expressed as an
Equation: λ =< A, B, π > DŽ
Figure I shows the hidden Markov model.
HMM can produce different sequences in different
probabilities and we can compute the probability of one
sequence produced by a HMM. Therefore, we can recognize a
group of sequences sharing the same pattern by training a
HMM. First, we estimate the state transition probabilities
distribution, the output symbol probabilities distribution and
the initial state probabilities distribution to build the initial
HMMs. Next, use the chosen training algorithm to revise the
parameters to match the given data. The trained HMM can
represent a group of sequences well and we can use it to
distinguish unknown sequences. The more the sequence is
similar to those in this group, the higher probability it can be
produced in by the trained HMM. By computing the output
probability, we can cluster sequences.
IV. CONTENT-BASED FILTERING RECOMMENDATION
ALGORITHM USING HMM
A. Theory of the algorithm
This algorithm is based on the initial data which are in the
form of sequences with equal length. In information theory, the
Hamming distance between two strings with equal length is the
number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are
different. Put in other words, it represents the minimum
number of substitutions required to change one string into the
other. For example, the Hamming distance between 1011101
and 1001001 is 2. Then, we use K-Means with Hamming
distance as similarity standard to cluster these sequences
preliminarily and build k initial clusters. Next, we train HMM
for each cluster by applying the Forward-Backward algorithm
and get k HMMs. After that, We compute the probabilities of
each sequence produced from these k HMMs by using Forward
algorithm and reallocate each sequence to the HMM which has
the largest probability to produce it. The higher the probability
is, the farther the distance is between the sequence and HMM
[5]. On next step, retrain each HMM in order to adapt model to
the new clustering result. We repeat the reallocation and
retraining procedures until the clustering result does not change
any more or the number of iterations reaches the maximum
value we set.
We use first K-Means clustering result as the input to the
HMM training in order to enhance similarity inside each
cluster and difference between clusters. Therefore, the first K-
276
Means procedure helps improve the accuracy of subsequent
HMMs training and the reallocation procedure.
B. Steps of the algorithm
We download data from GroupLens (http://www.grouplens.
org) which was collected from MovieLens (http://movielens.u
mn.edu). It contains 100,000 ratings (1-5) from 943 users on
1682 movies. Each user has rated at least 20 movies. The
format of movie data is as follows:
32|Crumb (1994)|01-Jan-1994||http://us.imdb.com/M/title-
exact?Crumb%20(1994)|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0
Movie information is a tab separated list of movie id |
movie title | release date | video release date | IMDb URL |
unknown | Action | Adventure | Animation | Children's |
Comedy | Crime | Documentary | Drama | Fantasy | Film-Noir |
Horror | Musical | Mystery | Romance | Sci-Fi | Thriller | War |
Western |
The last 19 fields are the genres. 1 indicates the movie is of
that genre, while 0 indicates it is not. Movies can be in several
genres at once.
We transform movie data into the following format we call
“genre string” without taking the publishing date into account:
0000000100000000000. Each number indicates whether this
movie is belonging to that genre, and 0000000100000000000
represents the movie Crumb. After the initializing of data, the
subsequent steps are:
a) Use K-Means with Hamming distance as similarity
standard to cluster “genre string” and get k clusters. Save the
result of clustering in array clusterResult[i][j], 1 i k , where
j is the number of sequences in that cluster.
b) Train HMM for each cluster which is saved in
clusterResult[i][j] by applying the Forward-Backward
algorithm and get k HMMs, each one of which represents its
cluster well.
c) Compute the probabilities of each “genre string”
produced from these k HMMs by using Forward algorithm
and reallocate it to the HMM which has the largest probability
to produce it. Then, save the new result in clusterResult[i][j].
d) Repeat step 2 to step 3 until the clustering result does
not change any more or the number of iterations reaches the
maximum value we set.
Through steps above, we cluster movies by using HMM.
After a certain user has watched a movie, we can recommend
another movie in the same genres of that one.
V. EXPERIMENT
In general, we use precision and recall rate to assess the
quality of recommendation results. They can be described as:
C
precision =
T
C
recall rate=
S
C represents the number of correct recommended items. T
represents the total number of recommended items. S
represents the number of items which should be recommended.
 We compare the precision and recall rates of vector space
model based algorithm (VSM-Based algorithm) and HMM-
based algorithm and Figure II shows the experiment result.
According to the result, we can see the average precision of
HMM-based algorithm is higher than VSM-Based algorithm.
The main reason is that VSM-Based algorithm calls for
accurate match, however, the number of similar key words
which are shared between items and user interests is so few
generally that the precision of VSM-Based algorithm
decreases sharply. By contrast, HMM-based algorithm can
avoid this problem by utilizing probabilities distribution to
measure similarity between items and user interests. Therefore,
the average precision of HMM-based algorithm is higher.
VI. CONCLUSION
We propose content-based filtering recommendation
algorithm using HMM for personalized recommendation
system. Compared with VSM-Based algorithm, the new
method is more effective on describing a user’s interest.
However, it is difficulty to apply an all-purpose
recommendation algorithm and describe user interests precisely
for different background. In future work, we will focus on the
development of relational techniques and keep improving the
average precision of our algorithm.
REFERENCE
[1] D. Bawden, C. Holtham, and N. Courtney. “Perspectives on information
overload,” Aslib Proceedings , vol. 51, Sep. 1999, pp. 249-255.
[2] G. Adomavicius and A. Tuzhilin. “Toward the Next Generation of
Recommender Systems: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art and Possible
Extensions,” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering,
vol. 17, Jun. 2005, pp. 734-749.
[3] R. Baeza-Yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto. “Modem Information Retrieval,”
New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co, 1999, pp. 271–350.
[4] L. R. Rabiner, “A Tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and Selected
Applications in Speech Recognition,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 77,
Feb. 1989, pp. 257–286.
[5] S. Zhong and J. Ghosh. “A Unified Framework for Model-based
Clustering,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 4, Dec. 2003,
pp.1001-1037.

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