• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.19-38
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• 2017

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm has been popularly used for implementing recommender systems. Until now, there have been many prior studies to improve the accuracy of CF. Among them, some recent studies adopt 'hybrid recommendation approach', which enhances the performance of conventional CF by using additional information. In this research, we propose a new hybrid recommender system which fuses CF and the results from the social network analysis on trust and distrust relationship networks among users to enhance prediction accuracy. The proposed algorithm of our study is based on memory-based CF. But, when calculating the similarity between users in CF, our proposed algorithm considers not only the correlation of the users' numeric rating patterns, but also the users' in-degree centrality values derived from trust and distrust relationship networks. In specific, it is designed to amplify the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the trust relationship network. Also, it attenuates the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the distrust relationship network. Our proposed algorithm considers four (4) types of user relationships - direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, and indirect distrust - in total. And, it uses four adjusting coefficients, which adjusts the level of amplification / attenuation for in-degree centrality values derived from direct / indirect trust and distrust relationship networks. To determine optimal adjusting coefficients, genetic algorithms (GA) has been adopted. Under this background, we named our proposed algorithm as SNACF-GA (Social Network Analysis - based CF using GA). To validate the performance of the SNACF-GA, we used a real-world data set which is called 'Extended Epinions dataset' provided by 'trustlet.org'. It is the data set contains user responses (rating scores and reviews) after purchasing specific items (e.g. car, movie, music, book) as well as trust / distrust relationship information indicating whom to trust or distrust between users. The experimental system was basically developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but we also used UCINET 6 for calculating the in-degree centrality of trust / distrust relationship networks. In addition, we used Palisade Software's Evolver, which is a commercial software implements genetic algorithm. To examine the effectiveness of our proposed system more precisely, we adopted two comparison models. The first comparison model is conventional CF. It only uses users' explicit numeric ratings when calculating the similarities between users. That is, it does not consider trust / distrust relationship between users at all. The second comparison model is SNACF (Social Network Analysis - based CF). SNACF differs from the proposed algorithm SNACF-GA in that it considers only direct trust / distrust relationships. It also does not use GA optimization. The performances of the proposed algorithm and comparison models were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). Experimental result showed that the optimal adjusting coefficients for direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, indirect distrust were 0, 1.4287, 1.5, 0.4615 each. This implies that distrust relationships between users are more important than trust ones in recommender systems. From the perspective of recommendation accuracy, SNACF-GA (Avg. MAE = 0.111943), the proposed algorithm which reflects both direct and indirect trust / distrust relationships information, was found to greatly outperform a conventional CF (Avg. MAE = 0.112638). Also, the algorithm showed better recommendation accuracy than the SNACF (Avg. MAE = 0.112209). To confirm whether these differences are statistically significant or not, we applied paired samples t-test. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that the difference between SNACF-GA and conventional CF was statistical significant at the 1% significance level, and the difference between SNACF-GA and SNACF was statistical significant at the 5%. Our study found that the trust/distrust relationship can be important information for improving performance of recommendation algorithms. Especially, distrust relationship information was found to have a greater impact on the performance improvement of CF. This implies that we need to have more attention on distrust (negative) relationships rather than trust (positive) ones when tracking and managing social relationships between users.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2015

Collaborative filtering(CF) algorithm has been popularly used for recommender systems in both academic and practical applications. A general CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and creates recommendation results with the items favored by other people with similar tastes. Thus, it is very important for CF to measure the similarities between users because the recommendation quality depends on it. In most cases, users' explicit numeric ratings of items(i.e. quantitative information) have only been used to calculate the similarities between users in CF. However, several studies indicated that qualitative information such as user's reviews on the items may contribute to measure these similarities more accurately. Considering that a lot of people are likely to share their honest opinion on the items they purchased recently due to the advent of the Web 2.0, user's reviews can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, this study proposes a new hybrid recommender system that combines with users' review mining. Our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and his/her text reviews on the items when calculating similarities between users. In specific, our system creates not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-item review term matrix. Then, it calculates rating similarity and review similarity from each matrix, and calculates the final user-to-user similarity based on these two similarities(i.e. rating and review similarities). As the methods for calculating review similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is to use the frequency of the commonly used terms, and the other one is to use the sum of the importance weights of the commonly used terms in users' review. In the case of the importance weights of terms, we proposed the use of average TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) weights. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we applied it to the implementation of a recommender system for smartphone applications (hereafter, app). At present, over a million apps are offered in each app stores operated by Google and Apple. Due to this information overload, users have difficulty in selecting proper apps that they really want. Furthermore, app store operators like Google and Apple have cumulated huge amount of users' reviews on apps until now. Thus, we chose smartphone app stores as the application domain of our system. In order to collect the experimental data set, we built and operated a Web-based data collection system for about two weeks. As a result, we could obtain 1,246 valid responses(ratings and reviews) from 78 users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications(VBA) and SAS Text Miner. And, to avoid distortion due to human intervention, we did not adopt any refining works by human during the user's review mining process. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared its performance to the performance of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using average MAE(mean absolute error). The experimental results showed that our proposed system(MAE = 0.7867 ~ 0.7881) slightly outperformed a conventional CF system(MAE = 0.7939). Also, they showed that the calculation of review similarity between users based on the TF-IDF weights(MAE = 0.7867) leaded to better recommendation accuracy than the calculation based on the frequency of the commonly used terms in reviews(MAE = 0.7881). The results from paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system with review similarity calculation using the frequency of the commonly used terms outperformed conventional CF system with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of users' review information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.113-127
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• 2016

Among the techniques for recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF) is commonly recognized to be the most effective for implementing recommender systems. Until now, CF has been popularly studied and adopted in both academic and real-world applications. The basic idea of CF is to create recommendation results by finding correlations between users of a recommendation system. CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and recommend products to users by using other like-minded people's results of evaluation for each product. Thus, it is very important to compute evaluation similarities among users in CF because the recommendation quality depends on it. Typical CF uses user's explicit numeric ratings of items (i.e. quantitative information) when computing the similarities among users in CF. In other words, user's numeric ratings have been a sole source of user preference information in traditional CF. However, user ratings are unable to fully reflect user's actual preferences from time to time. According to several studies, users may more actively accommodate recommendation of reliable others when purchasing goods. Thus, trust relationship can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, we propose a new hybrid recommender system that fuses CF and social network analysis (SNA). The proposed system adopts the recommendation algorithm that additionally reflect the result analyzed by SNA. In detail, our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and trust relationship information between users when calculating user similarities. For this, our system creates and uses not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-to-user trust network. As the methods for calculating user similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is algorithm calculating the degree of similarity between users by utilizing in-degree and out-degree centrality, which are the indices representing the central location in the social network. We named these approaches as 'Trust CF - All' and 'Trust CF - Conditional'. The other alternative is the algorithm reflecting a neighbor's score higher when a target user trusts the neighbor directly or indirectly. The direct or indirect trust relationship can be identified by searching trust network of users. In this study, we call this approach 'Trust CF - Search'. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we used experimental data provided by LibRec that crawled from the entire FilmTrust website. It consists of ratings of movies and trust relationship network indicating who to trust between users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and UCINET 6. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared the performance of our proposed method with one of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender system were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). The analysis results confirmed that in case of applying without conditions the in-degree centrality index of trusted network of users(i.e. Trust CF - All), the accuracy (MAE = 0.565134) was lower than conventional CF (MAE = 0.564966). And, in case of applying the in-degree centrality index only to the users with the out-degree centrality above a certain threshold value(i.e. Trust CF - Conditional), the proposed system improved the accuracy a little (MAE = 0.564909) compared to traditional CF. However, the algorithm searching based on the trusted network of users (i.e. Trust CF - Search) was found to show the best performance (MAE = 0.564846). And the result from paired samples t-test presented that Trust CF - Search outperformed conventional CF with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of user's trust relationship network information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.19-36
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• 2015

Social media is an emerging issue in content services and in current business environment. YouTube is the most representative social media service in the world. YouTube is different from other conventional content services in its open user participation and contents creation methods. To promote a content in YouTube, it is important to understand the diffusion phenomena of contents and the network structural characteristics. Most previous studies analyzed impact factors of contents diffusion from the view point of general behavioral factors. Currently some researchers use network structure factors. However, these two approaches have been used separately. However this study tries to analyze the general impact factors on the view count and content based network structures all together. In addition, when building a content based network, this study forms the network structure by analyzing user comments on 22,370 contents of YouTube not based on the individual user based network. From this study, we re-proved statistically the causal relations between view count and not only general factors but also network factors. Moreover by analyzing this integrated research model, we found that these factors affect the view count of YouTube according to the following order; Uploader Followers, Video Age, Betweenness Centrality, Comments, Closeness Centrality, Clustering Coefficient and Rating. However Degree Centrality and Eigenvector Centrality affect the view count negatively. From this research some strategic points for the utilizing of contents diffusion are as followings. First, it is needed to manage general factors such as the number of uploader followers or subscribers, the video age, the number of comments, average rating points, and etc. The impact of average rating points is not so much important as we thought before. However, it is needed to increase the number of uploader followers strategically and sustain the contents in the service as long as possible. Second, we need to pay attention to the impacts of betweenness centrality and closeness centrality among other network factors. Users seems to search the related subject or similar contents after watching a content. It is needed to shorten the distance between other popular contents in the service. Namely, this study showed that it is beneficial for increasing view counts by decreasing the number of search attempts and increasing similarity with many other contents. This is consistent with the result of the clustering coefficient impact analysis. Third, it is important to notice the negative impact of degree centrality and eigenvector centrality on the view count. If the number of connections with other contents is too much increased it means there are many similar contents and eventually it might distribute the view counts. Moreover, too high eigenvector centrality means that there are connections with popular contents around the content, and it might lose the view count because of the impact of the popular contents. It would be better to avoid connections with too powerful popular contents. From this study we analyzed the phenomenon and verified diffusion factors of Youtube contents by using an integrated model consisting of general factors and network structure factors. From the viewpoints of social contribution, this study might provide useful information to music or movie industry or other contents vendors for their effective contents services. This research provides basic schemes that can be applied strategically in online contents marketing. One of the limitations of this study is that this study formed a contents based network for the network structure analysis. It might be an indirect method to see the content network structure. We can use more various methods to establish direct content network. Further researches include more detailed researches like an analysis according to the types of contents or domains or characteristics of the contents or users, and etc.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.157-173
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• 2021

With the development of information technology, the amount of available information increases daily. However, having access to so much information makes it difficult for users to easily find the information they seek. Users want a visualized system that reduces information retrieval and learning time, saving them from personally reading and judging all available information. As a result, recommendation systems are an increasingly important technologies that are essential to the business. Collaborative filtering is used in various fields with excellent performance because recommendations are made based on similar user interests and preferences. However, limitations do exist. Sparsity occurs when user-item preference information is insufficient, and is the main limitation of collaborative filtering. The evaluation value of the user item matrix may be distorted by the data depending on the popularity of the product, or there may be new users who have not yet evaluated the value. The lack of historical data to identify consumer preferences is referred to as data sparsity, and various methods have been studied to address these problems. However, most attempts to solve the sparsity problem are not optimal because they can only be applied when additional data such as users' personal information, social networks, or characteristics of items are included. Another problem is that real-world score data are mostly biased to high scores, resulting in severe imbalances. One cause of this imbalance distribution is the purchasing bias, in which only users with high product ratings purchase products, so those with low ratings are less likely to purchase products and thus do not leave negative product reviews. Due to these characteristics, unlike most users' actual preferences, reviews by users who purchase products are more likely to be positive. Therefore, the actual rating data is over-learned in many classes with high incidence due to its biased characteristics, distorting the market. Applying collaborative filtering to these imbalanced data leads to poor recommendation performance due to excessive learning of biased classes. Traditional oversampling techniques to address this problem are likely to cause overfitting because they repeat the same data, which acts as noise in learning, reducing recommendation performance. In addition, pre-processing methods for most existing data imbalance problems are designed and used for binary classes. Binary class imbalance techniques are difficult to apply to multi-class problems because they cannot model multi-class problems, such as objects at cross-class boundaries or objects overlapping multiple classes. To solve this problem, research has been conducted to convert and apply multi-class problems to binary class problems. However, simplification of multi-class problems can cause potential classification errors when combined with the results of classifiers learned from other sub-problems, resulting in loss of important information about relationships beyond the selected items. Therefore, it is necessary to develop more effective methods to address multi-class imbalance problems. We propose a collaborative filtering model using CGAN to generate realistic virtual data to populate the empty user-item matrix. Conditional vector y identify distributions for minority classes and generate data reflecting their characteristics. Collaborative filtering then maximizes the performance of the recommendation system via hyperparameter tuning. This process should improve the accuracy of the model by addressing the sparsity problem of collaborative filtering implementations while mitigating data imbalances arising from real data. Our model has superior recommendation performance over existing oversampling techniques and existing real-world data with data sparsity. SMOTE, Borderline SMOTE, SVM-SMOTE, ADASYN, and GAN were used as comparative models and we demonstrate the highest prediction accuracy on the RMSE and MAE evaluation scales. Through this study, oversampling based on deep learning will be able to further refine the performance of recommendation systems using actual data and be used to build business recommendation systems.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.26-34
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• 1999

Background : Generally $VO_2$ max is higher in treadmill exercise than cycle ergometer exercise. According to Hassen and Wasserman, $VO_2$ max with treadmill exercise is higher at ratio of 1.11 than that with cycle ergometer. $VO_2$ max also is influenced by race, sociocultural background, exercise habit In this study, $VO_2$ max and AT were evaluated between Treadmill and cycle exercise in male Korean college students. Method: Study subjects were 44 male college students. We randomized them into 2 groups; 24 students did treadmill exercise at first and 1 week later did cycle ergometer. Another 20 students did in opposite method. They made symptom limited maximal exercise. Author defined maximal exercise as followings: 1) respiratory exchange ratio(RER)> 1.1, 2) plateau>30 sec, 3) heart rate reserve(HRR) <15%, or 4) breathing reserve (BR)<30%. Otherwise their results are excluded as submaximal exercise. Anaerobic threshold(AT) was estimated by V-slope method. Results: $VO_2$ max and AT was $45.1{\pm}6.66m\ell$/kg/min and $26.0{\pm}6.78m\ell$/kg/min in treadmill and $34.9{\pm}5.89m\ell$/kg/min, $19.5{\pm}4.77m\ell$/kg/min in Cycle Ergometer. The measured-$VO_2max$/pred-$VO_2max$ was $98.8{\pm}13.24%$ in treadmill; $84.4{\pm}13.42%$ in cycle ergometer. Comparing $VO_2$ max in treadmill with that obtained by Hassen's method, there were significant differences.(p<0.01). At maximal exercise there were differences in HRR, $O_2$/pulse, BR, $V_E$/MVV, $V_E/VCO_2$ between treadmill and cycle but not in $V_E/VO_2$, Vd/Vt, Ti/Ttot. At AT there were differences in $O_2$/pulse, BR, $V_E$/MVV, Ti/Ttot between treadmill and cycle, otherwise not. Conclusion: According to the result of this study, there are larger gap between treadmill and cycle ergometer in normal Korean adults than foreign data, and it needs further study to obtain reference value of Korea.