GraphLab - How does FactorizationRecommender.predict precisely work? - python-2.7

I have a question with regard to the predict function of the FactorizationRecommender.
At my disposal, I have a large dataset with user item pairs (and a binary rating for each pair). Important to note is that users have not interacted with all items (the rating matrix is very sparse).
Subsequently, I remove all ratings of one user (I choose him/her to be the cold user) from the dataset. On all remaining user item pairs I train a matrix factorization model (factorization_recommender.create(...,binary_target=True)).
Now, I would like to make predictions for the remaining ratings of the cold user when I show the model a fraction of the cold user's ratings (e.g., I show the model 10 of the cold user's ratings and want to compute predicted ratings for all other items). Next I want to compute the RMSE of the predictions ONLY for the cold user.
My question is two-fold. First of all, it is not entirely clear to me which arguments to pass to the FactorizationRecommender.predict function.
The fraction of the user item pairs (and binary ratings) that I want to show to the model (e.g., the 10 ratings), should these be the new_observation_data? And what should my input be for the dataset? The initial training dataset?
Secondly, my question is how the FactorizationRecommender.predict function precisely works (what's happening in the background)? How can you make predictions on a user that is not included in the initial training dataset? As the latent factors of the factorization are not built for this user, how are his/her predictions made?
My current version of GraphLab Create is v1.10.1.
Thanks for your help!

Related

How do Amazon Personalise Campaign Scores Work

I'm using AWS Personalize to suggest recommendations based on thousands of 'likes' in our platform. Currently using User, User-Interaction and Item data, we get a score between 0.00004 and 0.006.
Firstly, how is the score calculated, and based on the example I gave, is it low?
Thanks,
The formula for calculating scores depends on the use case and recipe. Based on the documentation for the user-personalization recipe:
Models that are based on USER_PERSONALIZATION recipes score all of the items in your Items dataset relative to each other on a scale from 0 to 1 (both inclusive), so that the total of all scores equals 1. For example, if you're getting movie recommendations for a user and there are three movies in the Items dataset, their scores might be 0.6, 0.3, and 0.1. Similarly, if you have 1,000 movies in your inventory, the highest-scoring movies might have very small scores (the average score would be .001), but, because scoring is relative, the recommendations are still valid.
Since the score values you shared have low absolute values, I suspect that you're using user-personalization. The higher number of distinct items in your interactions dataset, the smaller the score values will be. Look at the scores relative to other items in the response rather than reading too much into their absolute values.
However, the scoring formula for the personalized-ranking is different.
Like the scores returned by the GetRecommendations operation, GetPersonalizedRanking scores sum to 1, but because the list of considered items is much smaller than your full Items dataset, recommendation scores tend to be higher.
Mathematically, the scoring function for GetPersonalizedRanking is identical to GetRecommendations, except that it only considers the input items. This means that scores closer to 1 become more likely, as there are fewer other choices to divide up the score

Preserve Order for Cross Validation in Weka

I am using the Weka GUI for classifying sensor data.
I have measures of 10 people, the data is sorted. So the first 10% correspond to participant 1, the second 10% to participant 2 etc.
I would like to use 10 fold cross validation to build a model on 9 participants and test it on the remaining participant. In my case I believe I could accomplish this by simply not randomizing the data splits.
How would I best go about doing this?
I don't know how to do this in the Explorer.
In the KnowledgeFlow GUI, there is a CrossValidationFoldMaker used to create cross-validation folds. This has an option to Preserve instances order, which says it preserves the order of instances rather than randomly shuffling.
There's a video describing the KnowledgeFlow interface here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHSgoVX9z-8&t=7s

How can I restrict the output of an Amazon Machine Learning model? (Predicting cricket team results)

I am trying to predict match winner based on the historical data set as shown below,
The data set comprises of IPL seasons and Team_Name_id vs Opponent Team are the team names in IPL. I have set the match id as Row id and created the model. When running realtime testing, the result is not as expected (shown below)
Target is set as Match_winner_id.
Am I missing any configurations? Please help
The model is working perfectly correctly. There's just two problems:
Your input data is not very good
There's no way for the model to know that only one of those two teams should win
Data Quality
A predictive model needs good quality input data on which to reverse-engineer a model that explains a given result. This input data should contain information that can be used to predict a result given a different set of input data.
For example, when predicting house prices, it would need to know the suburb (category), number of bedrooms/bathrooms/parking spaces, age of the building and selling price. It could then predict the selling price for other houses with a slightly different mix of variables.
However, based on your screenshot, you are giving the following information (and probably more) on which to make your prediction:
Teams: Not great, because you are separating Column C and Column D. The model will assume they are unrelated information. It doesn't realise that those two values could be swapped.
Match date: Useless information unless the outcome varies in proportion to time (eg a team continually gets better)
Season: As with Match Date, this is probably useless because you're always predicting the future -- you won't be predicting for a past season
Venue: Only relevant if a particular team always wins at a given venue
Toss Decision: Would this really influence the outcome? Also, it's only known once the game begins, so not great for predicting a future game.
Win Type: You won't know the win type until a game is over, so it's not suitable for predicting a future game.
Score: Again, not known until the actual game, so no good for future predictions.
Man of the Match: Not known for future games.
Umpire: How does an umpire influence the result of a game?
City: Yes, given that home teams often have an advantage.
You have provided very little information that could be used to predict a future game. There is really only the teams and the venue. Everything else is either part of the game itself or irrelevant.
Picking only one of the two teams
When the ML model looks at your data and tries to make a prediction, it will look at all the data you have provided. For example, it might notice that for a given venue and season, Team 8 has a higher propensity to win. Therefore, given that venue and season, it will favour a win by Team 8. The model has no concept that the only possible outcome is one of the two teams given in columns C and D.
You are predicting for two given teams and you are listing the teams in either Column C or Column D and this makes no sense -- the result is the same if you swapped the teams between columns, but the model has no concept of this. Also, information about Team 1 vs Team 2 is totally irrelevant for Team 3 vs Team 4.
What you should do is create one dataset per team, listing all their matches, plus a column that shows the outcome -- either a boolean (Win/Lose) or a value that represents the number of runs by which they won (where negative is a loss). You would then ask them model to predict the result for that team, given the input data, which would be win/lose or a points above/below the other team.
But at the core, I think that your input data doesn't have enough rich content to be able to make a sensible prediction. Just ask yourself: "What data would I like to know if I were to guess which team would win?" It would probably be past results, weather conditions, which players were on each team, how many matches they played in the last week, etc. None of this information is being provided as input on each line of your input data.

AWS Machine Learning Data

I'm using the AWS Machine Learning regression to predict the waiting time in a line of a restaurant, in a specific weekday/time.
Today I have around 800k data.
Example Data:
restaurantID (rowID)weekDay (categorical)time (categorical)tablePeople (numeric)waitingTime (numeric - target)1 sun 21:29 2 23
2 fri 20:13 4 43
...
I have two questions:
1)
Should I use time as Categorical or Numeric?
It's better to split into two fields: minutes and seconds?
2)
I would like in the same model to get the predictions for all my restaurants.
Example:
I expected to send the rowID identifier and it returns different predictions, based on each restaurant data (ignoring others data).
I tried, but it's returning the same prediction for any rowID. Why?
Should I have a model for each restaurant?
There are several problems with the way you set-up your model
1) Time in the form you have it should never be categorical. Your model treats times 12:29 and 12:30 as two completely independent attributes. So it will never use facts it learn about 12:29 to predict what's going to happen at 12:30. In your case you either should set time to be numeric. Not sure if amazon ML can convert it for you automatically. If not just multiply hour by 60 and add minutes to it. Another interesting thing to do is to bucketize your time, by selecting which half hour or wider interval. You do it by dividing (h*60+m) by some number depending how many buckets you want. So to try 120 to get 2 hr intervals. Generally the more data you have the smaller intervals you can have. The key is to have a lot of samples in each bucket.
2) You should really think about removing restaurantID from your input data. Having it there will cause the model to over-fit on it. So it will not be able to make predictions about restaurant with id:5 based on the facts it learn from restaurants with id:3 or id:9. Having restaurant id there might be okay if you have a lot of data about each restaurant and you don't care about extrapolating your predictions to the restaurants that are not in the training set.
3) You never send restaurantID to predict data about it. The way it usually works you need to pick what are you trying to predict. In your case probably 'waitingTime' is most useful attribute. So you need to send weekDay, time and number of people and the model will output waiting time.
You should think what is relevant for the prediction to be accurate, and you should use your domain expertise to define the features/attributes you need to have in your data.
For example, time of the day, is not just a number. From my limited understanding in restaurant, I would drop the minutes, and only focus on the hours.
I would certainly create a model for each restaurant, as the popularity of the restaurant or the type of food it is serving is having an impact on the wait time. With Amazon ML it is easy to create many models as you can build the model using the SDK, and even schedule retraining of the models using AWS Lambda (that mean automatically).
I'm not sure what the feature called tablePeople means, but a general recommendation is to have as many as possible relevant features, to get better prediction. For example, month or season is probably important as well.
In contrast with some answers to this post, I think resturantID helps and it actually gives valuable information. If you have a significant amount of data per each restaurant then you can train a model per each restaurant and get a good accuracy, but if you don't have enough data then resturantID is very informative.
1) Just imagine what if you had only two columns in your dataset: restaurantID and waitingTime. Then wouldn't you think the restaurantID from the testing data helps you to find a rough waiting time? In the simplest implementation, your waiting time per each restaurantID would be the average of waitingTime. So definitely restaurantID is a valuable information. Now that you have more features in your dataset, you need to check if restaurantID is as effective as the other features or not.
2) If you decide to keep restaurantID then you must use it as a categorical string. It should be a non-parametric feature in your dataset and maybe that's why you did not get a proper result.
On the issue with day and time I agree with other answers and considering that you are building your model for the restaurant, hourly time may give a more accurate result.

Collaborative Filtering: Ways to determine implicit scores for products for each user?

Having implemented an algorithm to recommend products with some success, I'm now looking at ways to calculate the initial input data for this algorithm.
My objective is to calculate a score for each product that a user has some sort of history with.
The data I am currently collecting:
User order history
Product pageview history for both anonymous and registered users
All of this data is timestamped.
What I'm looking for
There are a couple of things I'm looking for suggestions on, and ideally this question should be treated more for discussion rather than aiming for a single 'right' answer.
Any additional data I can collect for a user that can directly imply an interest in a product
Algorithms/equations for turning this data into scores for each product
What I'm NOT looking for
Just to avoid this question being derailed with the wrong kind of answers, here is what I'm doing once I have this data for each user:
Generating a number of user clusters (21 at the moment) using the k-means clustering algorithm, using the pearsons coefficient for the distance score
For each user (on demand) calculating their a graph of similar users by looking for their most and least similar users within their cluster, and repeating for an arbitrary depth.
Calculating a score for each product based on the preferences of other users within the user's graph
Sorting the scores to return a list of recommendations
Basically, I'm not looking for ideas on what to do once I have the input data (I may need further help with that later, but it's not the point of this question), just for ideas on how to generate this input data in the first place
Here's a haymaker of a response:
time spent looking at a product
semantic interpretation of comments left about the product
make a discussion page about a product, brand, or product category and semantically interpret the comments
if they Shared a product page (email, del.icio.us, etc.)
browser (mobile might make them spend less time on the page vis-à-vis laptop while indicating great interest) and connection speed (affects amt. of time spent on the page)
facebook profile similarity
heatmap data (e.g. à la kissmetrics)
What kind of products are you selling? That might help us answer you better. (Since this is an old question, I am addressing both #Andrew Ingram and anyone else who has the same question and found this thread through search.)
You can allow users to explicitly state their preferences, the way netflix allows users to assign stars.
You can assign a positive numeric value for all the stuff they bought, since you say you do have their purchase history. Assign zero for stuff they didn't buy
You could do some sort of weighted value for stuff they bought, adjusted for what's popular. (if nearly everybody bought a product, it doesn't tell you much about a person that they also bought it) See "term frequency–inverse document frequency"
You could also assign some lesser numeric value for items that users looked at but did not buy.