Today’s competitive marketplace requires the industry to understand unique and particular needs of their customers. Product line practices enable companies to create individual products for every customer by providing an interdependent set of features. Users configure personalized products by consecutively selecting desired features based on their individual needs. However, as most features are interdependent, users must understand the impact of their gradual selections in order to make valid decisions. Thus, especially when dealing with large feature models, specialized assistance is needed to guide the users in configuring their product. Recently, recommender systems have proved to be an appropriate mean to assist users in finding information and making decisions. In this paper, we propose an advanced feature recommender system that provides personalized recommendations to users. In detail, we offer four main contributions: (i) We provide a recommender system that suggests relevant features to ease the decision-making process. (ii) Based on this system, we provide visual support to users that guides them through the decision-making process and allows them to focus on valid and relevant parts of the configuration space. (iii) We provide an interactive open-source configurator tool encompassing all those features. (iv) In order to demonstrate the performance of our approach, we compare three different recommender algorithms in two real case studies derived from business experience.
The paper establishes a relation between exact sequences, parametric finite elements, and perfectly matched layer (PML) techniques. We illuminate the analogy between the Piola-like maps used to define parametric H 1 -, H(curl)-, H(div)-, and L 2 -conforming elements, and the corresponding PML complex coordinates stretching for the same energy spaces. We deliver a method for obtaining PML-stretched bilinear forms (constituting the new weak formulation for the original problem with PML absorbing boundary layers) directly from their classical counterparts.
Numerous stream mining algorithms are equipped with forgetting mechanisms, such as sliding windows or fading factors, to make them adaptive to changes. In recommender systems those techniques have not been investigated thoroughly despite the very volatile nature of users' preferences that they deal with. We developed five new forgetting techniques for incremental matrix factorization in recommender systems. We show on eight datasets that our techniques improve the predictive power of recommender systems. Experiments with both explicit rating feedback and positive-only feedback confirm our findings showing that forgetting information is beneficial despite the extreme data sparsity that recommender systems struggle with. Improvement through forgetting also proves that users' preferences are subject to concept drift.
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