FluRS: A Python Library for Online Item Recommendation

Home > Blog > FluRS: A Python Library for Online Item Recommendation

2017-01-21

FluRS: A Python Library for Online Item Recommendation

Last week, I introduced a Julia package for recommender systems: Recommendation.jl: Building Recommender Systems in Julia.

However, its functionality is still low, and I argued that implementing more powerful recommendation techniques and update() function is important. Thus, this article provides FluRS, another open-sourced library for recommendation. Unlike Recommendation.jl, this recommender-specific library is written in Python from a practical point of view.

The initial version (v0.0.1) of FluRS is already published to PyPI. You can install and use the library by:

$ pip install flurs

This article simply describes basic ideas and concepts behind the implementation. See the README file to learn how to use the library.

Python for recommendation

In a context of recommendation, one of the most popular open-source libraries written in Python is fastFM, a library for factorization machine (FM) which is a state-of-the-art flexible factorization model. However, fastFM is actually a more generic library for FM-based prediction; it can be used for various applications such as, but not limited to recommendation.

Although there are several recommender-specific packages in the other programming languages like LensKit and LibRec running in the Java virtual machine, and MyMediaLite written in C#, Python implementation and related research papers do not exist to the best of my knowledge. Furthermore, incremental updating (i.e., update() method) of recommendation engines is a less well-developed feature compared to batch training functions. Hence, I developed the new Python library for online, incremental recommendation named FluRS.

Recommendation algorithms

Currently, FluRS supports the following (incremental) recommendation algorithms.

Incremental Collaborative Filtering (UserKNN)
- M. Pepagelis et al. Incremental Collaborative Filtering for Highly-Scalable Recommendation Algorithms. In Foundations of Intelligent Systems, pp. 553–561, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2005.
Incremental Matrix Factorization (MF)
- J. Vinagre et al. Fast Incremental Matrix Factorization for Recommendation with Positive-only . In Proc. of UMAP 2014, pp. 459–470, July 2014.
Incremental Matrix Factorization with BPR optimization (BPRMF)
- S. Rendle et al. BPR: Bayesian Personalized Ranking from Implicit Feedback. In Proc. of UAI 2009, pp. 452–461, June 2009.
Incremental Factorization Machines (FM)
- T. Kitazawa. Incremental Factorization Machines for Persistently Cold-Starting Online Item Recommendation. arXiv:1607.02858 [cs.LG], July 2016.
Matrix Sketching (OnlineSketch)
- T. Kitazawa. Sketching Dynamic User-Item Interactions for Online Item Recommendation. In Proc. of CHIIR 2017, March 2017. (to appear)

How to represent users, items and events

Similarly to Recommendation.jl, FluRS also encapsulates a user, item and corresponding event in entity classes as follows:

import numpy as np


class User:

    def __init__(self, index, feature=np.array([0.])):
        self.index = index
        self.feature = feature


class Item:

    def __init__(self, index, feature=np.array([0.])):
        self.index = index
        self.feature = feature


class Event:

    def __init__(self, user, item, value, context=np.array([0.])):
        self.user = user
        self.item = item
        self.value = value
        self.context = context

User and Item can store their internal features as array (vector) representation for feature-based recommendation. An Event entity then consists of user and item entities, and value describing the feedback (e.g., rating). Additionally, context is an auxiliary vector which holds contextual information of the events such as time and location. Note that the features and contexts can be dummy 1-dimensional vectors in case the vectors are not explicitly specified by the arguments.

Separating algorithms from recommender-specific implementations

Most importantly, this library separates algorithms from recommender-specific implementations which depend on the User, Item and Event entities. In particular, I defined two types of base classes for each of algorithms and recommenders as follows:

class BaseModel:

    def __init__(self, *args):
        """Set the hyperparameters.
        """
        pass

    def init_params(self):
        """Initialize model parameters.
        """
        pass

    def update_params(self, *args):
        """Update model parameters.
        """
        pass

class RecommenderMixin:

    def init_recommender(self, *args):
        # number of observed users
        self.n_user = 0

        # store user data
        self.users = {}

        # number of observed items
        self.n_item = 0

        # store item data
        self.items = {}

    def is_new_user(self, u):
        return u not in self.users

    def add_user(self, user):
        self.users[user.index] = {'known_items': set()}
        self.n_user += 1

    def is_new_item(self, i):
        return i not in self.items

    def add_item(self, item):
        self.items[item.index] = {}
        self.n_item += 1

    def update(self, event):
        pass

    def score(self, user, candidates):
        return

    def recommend(self, user, candidates):
        return

The former only provides model-specific functions such as updating model parameters, and the latter extends it to incremental recommender systems by injecting additional functions which use the User, Item and/or Event entities. The properties defined in the latter mixin continuously track observed users and items, and, if new users (items) are arrived, a recommender registers them on the internal dictionaries.

Generally speaking, performance of recommender systems is highly data-dependent, so we usually modify both underlying algorithms and recommenders' functionality depending on data. The separation in the library certainly makes the modifications easier.

In case we like to apply the dimensionality reduction techniques to input vectors, we only need to add some code to the recommender side's update() method and modify the entity-to-feature-vector converting procedure. Likewise, model-specific modification such as changing a loss function simply requires us to overwrite the update_params() method in a model class.

Example: Factorization machines on FluRS

To give a concrete example, the FluRS library defines a FM-based recommender as follows:

class FMRecommender(FactorizationMachine, FeatureRecommenderMixin):

Base classes FactorizationMachine and FeatureRecommenderMixin respectively inherit BaseModel and RecommenderMixin. Unlike RecommenderMixin, FeatureRecommenderMixin takes an additional argument context in a score() and recommend() method, because feature-based techniques allow us to represent an event as a feature vector by encoding and concatenating arbitrary variables.

Conclusion

From a practical perspective, FluRS can be applicable to a wide variety of datasets thanks to the encapsulation of users, items and events; once the samples are converted into an array of Event, testing the online item recommendation techniques on own data should be easy for FluRS. In addition, since algorithms and recommenders are separately implemented in the library, both extending the ready-made techniques and implementing new kind of recommenders are straightforward on the library.

In terms of evaluation and further modifications, our library equips several metrics and utility functions for the dimensionality reductions, so FluRS can also be a useful toolkit for feature-based and/or top-$N$ recommendation.

However, at the same time, efficiency of the library is still inadequate. Therefore, following the fastFM's highly efficient core implementation written in C is one possible future direction.

Author: Takuya Kitazawa

Takuya Kitazawa is a freelance software developer based in British Columbia, Canada. As a technologist specializing in AI and data-driven solutions, he has worked globally at Big Tech and start-up companies for a decade. At the intersection of tech and society, he is passionate about promoting the ethical use of information technologies through his mentoring, business consultation, and public engagement activities. See CV for more information, or contact at [email protected].

Now Gift a cup of coffee

Disclaimer

Opinions are my own and do not represent the views of organizations I am/was belonging to.
I am doing my best to ensure the accuracy and fair use of the information. However, there might be some errors, outdated information, or biased subjective statements because the main purpose of this blog is to jot down my personal thoughts as soon as possible before conducting an extensive investigation. Visitors understand the limitations and rely on any information at their own risk.
That said, if there is any issue with the content, please contact me so I can take the necessary action.