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IMPORTANT NOTES

The API of this package has changed since version 0.4, due to the API change of LIBMF 2.01 and some other design improvement.

Recommender System with the recosystem Package

About This Package

recosystem is an R wrapper of the LIBMF library developed by Yu-Chin Juan, Wei-Sheng Chin, Yong Zhuang, Bo-Wen Yuan, Meng-Yuan Yang, and Chih-Jen Lin (https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libmf/), an open source library for recommender system using parallel matrix factorization.

Highlights of LIBMF and recosystem

LIBMF is a high-performance C++ library for large scale matrix factorization. LIBMF itself is a parallelized library, meaning that users can take advantage of multicore CPUs to speed up the computation. It also utilizes some advanced CPU features to further improve the performance.

recosystem is a wrapper of LIBMF, hence it inherits most of the features of LIBMF, and additionally provides a number of user-friendly R functions to simplify data processing and model building. Also, unlike most other R packages for statistical modeling that store the whole dataset and model object in memory, LIBMF (and hence recosystem) can significantly reduce memory use, for instance the constructed model that contains information for prediction can be stored in the hard disk, and output result can also be directly written into a file rather than be kept in memory.

A Quick View of Recommender System

The main task of recommender system is to predict unknown entries in the rating matrix based on observed values, as is shown in the table below:

item_1 item_2 item_3 … item_n
user_1 2 3 ?? … 5
user_2 ?? 4 3 … ??
user_3 3 2 ?? … 3
… … … … …
user_m 1 ?? 5 … 4

Each cell with number in it is the rating given by some user on a specific item, while those marked with question marks are unknown ratings that need to be predicted. In some other literatures, this problem may be named collaborative filtering, matrix completion, matrix recovery, etc.

In recosystem, we provide convenient functions for model training, parameter tuning, model exporting, and model prediction.

Data Input and Output

Each step in the recommender system involves data input and output, as the table below shows:

Step Input Output
Model training Training data set –
Parameter tuning Training data set –
Exporting model – User matrix P, item matrix Q
Prediction Testing data set Predicted values

Data may have different formats and types of storage, for example the input data set may be saved in a file or stored as R objects, and users may want the output results to be directly written into file or to be returned as R objects for further processing. In recosystem, we use two classes, DataSource and Output, to handle data input and output in a unified way.

An object of class DataSource specifies the source of a data set (either training or testing), which can be created by the following two functions:

And an object of class Output describes how the result should be output, typically returned by the functions below:

More data source formats and output options may be supported in the future along with the development of this package.

Data Format

The data file for training set needs to be arranged in sparse matrix triplet form, i.e., each line in the file contains three numbers

user_index item_index rating

User index and item index may start with either 0 or 1, and this can be specified by the index1 parameter in data_file() and data_memory(). For example, with index1 = FALSE, the training data file for the rating matrix in the beginning of this article may look like

0 0 2
0 1 3
1 1 4
1 2 3
2 0 3
2 1 2
...

From version 0.4 recosystem supports two special types of matrix factorization: the binary matrix factorization (BMF), and the one-class matrix factorization (OCMF). BMF requires ratings to take value from {-1, 1}, and OCMF requires all the ratings to be positive.

Testing data file is similar to training data, but since the ratings in testing data are usually unknown, the rating entry in testing data file can be omitted, or can be replaced by any placeholder such as 0 or ?.

The testing data file for the same rating matrix would be

0 2
1 0
2 2
...

Example data files are contained in the <recosystem>/dat (or <recosystem>/inst/dat, for source package) directory.

Usage of recosystem

The usage of recosystem is quite simple, mainly consisting of the following steps:

  1. Create a model object (a Reference Class object in R) by calling Reco().
  2. (Optionally) call the $tune() method to select best tuning parameters along a set of candidate values.
  3. Train the model by calling the $train() method. A number of parameters can be set inside the function, possibly coming from the result of $tune().
  4. (Optionally) export the model via $output(), i.e. write the factorization matrices P and Q into files or return them as R objects.
  5. Use the $predict() method to compute predicted values.

Below is an example on some simulated data:

library(recosystem)
set.seed(123) # This is a randomized algorithm
train_set = data_file(system.file("dat", "smalltrain.txt", package = "recosystem"))
test_set  = data_file(system.file("dat", "smalltest.txt",  package = "recosystem"))
r = Reco()
opts = r$tune(train_set, opts = list(dim = c(10, 20, 30), lrate = c(0.1, 0.2),
                                     costp_l1 = 0, costq_l1 = 0,
                                     nthread = 1, niter = 10))
opts
$min
$min$dim
[1] 20

$min$costp_l1
[1] 0

$min$costp_l2
[1] 0.1

$min$costq_l1
[1] 0

$min$costq_l2
[1] 0.01

$min$lrate
[1] 0.1

$min$loss_fun
[1] 0.9804937


$res
   dim costp_l1 costp_l2 costq_l1 costq_l2 lrate  loss_fun
1   10        0     0.01        0     0.01   0.1 0.9996368
2   20        0     0.01        0     0.01   0.1 1.0040111
3   30        0     0.01        0     0.01   0.1 0.9967101
4   10        0     0.10        0     0.01   0.1 0.9930384
5   20        0     0.10        0     0.01   0.1 0.9804937
6   30        0     0.10        0     0.01   0.1 0.9921565
7   10        0     0.01        0     0.10   0.1 0.9857116
8   20        0     0.01        0     0.10   0.1 1.0006225
9   30        0     0.01        0     0.10   0.1 0.9891277
10  10        0     0.10        0     0.10   0.1 0.9826748
11  20        0     0.10        0     0.10   0.1 0.9807865
12  30        0     0.10        0     0.10   0.1 0.9863404
13  10        0     0.01        0     0.01   0.2 1.1022376
14  20        0     0.01        0     0.01   0.2 1.0266608
15  30        0     0.01        0     0.01   0.2 1.0039170
16  10        0     0.10        0     0.01   0.2 1.0734307
17  20        0     0.10        0     0.01   0.2 1.0393326
18  30        0     0.10        0     0.01   0.2 1.0003177
19  10        0     0.01        0     0.10   0.2 1.0769594
20  20        0     0.01        0     0.10   0.2 1.0323938
21  30        0     0.01        0     0.10   0.2 1.0061849
22  10        0     0.10        0     0.10   0.2 1.0365456
23  20        0     0.10        0     0.10   0.2 1.0023265
24  30        0     0.10        0     0.10   0.2 1.0044131
r$train(train_set, opts = c(opts$min, nthread = 1, niter = 10))
iter      tr_rmse          obj
   0       2.2673   5.3765e+04
   1       1.0267   1.3667e+04
   2       0.8372   1.0147e+04
   3       0.7977   9.4773e+03
   4       0.7703   9.0439e+03
   5       0.7402   8.5967e+03
   6       0.7048   8.1202e+03
   7       0.6609   7.5638e+03
   8       0.6133   7.0246e+03
   9       0.5614   6.4770e+03
## Write predictions to file
pred_file = tempfile()
r$predict(test_set, out_file(pred_file))
print(scan(pred_file, n = 10))
 [1] 3.92323 3.05510 2.98484 3.42607 2.53514 2.88135 2.93226 3.11718 2.40406 3.46282
## Or, directly return an R vector
pred_rvec = r$predict(test_set, out_memory())
head(pred_rvec, 10)
 [1] 3.923234 3.055096 2.984840 3.426066 2.535142 2.881347 2.932261 3.117176 2.404063
[10] 3.462822

Detailed help document for each function is available in topics ?recosystem::Reco, ?recosystem::tune, ?recosystem::train, ?recosystem::output and ?recosystem::predict.

Performance Improvement with Extra Installation Options

To build recosystem from source, one needs a C++ compiler that supports the C++11 standard.

Also, there are some flags in file src/Makevars (src/Makevars.win for Windows system) that may have influential effect on performance. It is strongly suggested to set proper flags according to your type of CPU before compiling the package, in order to achieve the best performance:

  1. The default Makevars provides generic options that should apply to most CPUs.
  2. If your CPU supports SSE3 (a list of supported CPUs), add
PKG_CPPFLAGS += -DUSESSE
PKG_CXXFLAGS += -msse3
  1. If not only SSE3 is supported but also AVX (a list of supported CPUs), add
PKG_CPPFLAGS += -DUSEAVX
PKG_CXXFLAGS += -mavx

After editing the Makevars file, run R CMD INSTALL recosystem on the package source directory to install recosystem.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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