Tianzi Zang

Tianzi Zang, Yanmin Zhu, Haobing Liu et al.

Traditional recommendation systems are faced with two long-standing obstacles, namely, data sparsity and cold-start problems, which promote the emergence and development of Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR). The core idea of CDR is to leverage information collected from other domains to alleviate the two problems in one domain. Over the last decade, many efforts have been engaged for cross-domain recommendation. Recently, with the development of deep learning and neural networks, a large number of methods have emerged. However, there is a limited number of systematic surveys on CDR, especially regarding the latest proposed methods as well as the recommendation scenarios and recommendation tasks they address. In this survey paper, we first proposed a two-level taxonomy of cross-domain recommendation which classifies different recommendation scenarios and recommendation tasks. We then introduce and summarize existing cross-domain recommendation approaches under different recommendation scenarios in a structured manner. We also organize datasets commonly used. We conclude this survey by providing several potential research directions about this field.

Haobing Liu, Yanmin Zhu, Tianzi Zang et al.

Prediction tasks about students have practical significance for both student and college. Making multiple predictions about students is an important part of a smart campus. For instance, predicting whether a student will fail to graduate can alert the student affairs office to take predictive measures to help the student improve his/her academic performance. With the development of information technology in colleges, we can collect digital footprints which encode heterogeneous behaviors continuously. In this paper, we focus on modeling heterogeneous behaviors and making multiple predictions together, since some prediction tasks are related and learning the model for a specific task may have the data sparsity problem. To this end, we propose a variant of LSTM and a soft-attention mechanism. The proposed LSTM is able to learn the student profile-aware representation from heterogeneous behavior sequences. The proposed soft-attention mechanism can dynamically learn different importance degrees of different days for every student. In this way, heterogeneous behaviors can be well modeled. In order to model interactions among multiple prediction tasks, we propose a co-attention mechanism based unit. With the help of the stacked units, we can explicitly control the knowledge transfer among multiple tasks. We design three motivating behavior prediction tasks based on a real-world dataset collected from a college. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on the three prediction tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.