Math 551

Lab 9

Goal: Use a norm and an inner product to detect similarity between users’ choices and to
create a simple recommender system.
Getting started: Open a new Matlab script and save it as “m551lab09.m”.

ˆ Open a new Matlab script and save it as “m551lab09.m”.

ˆ Download the file “users movies.mat” which contains the arrays movies, users movies,
users movies sort, index small, trial user and place it in your working directory.

What you have to submit: The file m551lab09.m which you will create during the lab
session.

Reminders About the Grading Software

Remember, the labs are graded with the help of software tools. If you do not follow the
instructions, you will lose points. If the instructions ask you to assign a value to a variable,
you must use the variable name given in the instructions. If the instructions ask you
to make a variable named x1 and instead you make a variable named x or X or X1 or any
name other than x1, the grading software will not find your variable and you will lose points.
Required variables are listed in the lab instructions in a gray box like this:
Variables: x1, A, q
At times you will also be asked to answer questions in a comment in your M-file. You must
format your text answers correctly. Questions that you must answer are shown in gray
boxes in the lab. For example, if you see the instruction
Q7: What does the Matlab command lu do?
your file must contain a line similar to the following somewhere

% Q7: It computes the LU decomposition of a matrix.

The important points about the formatting are

ˆ The answer is on a single line.

ˆ The first characters on the line is the comment character %.

ˆ The answer is labeled in the form Qn:, where n stands for the question number from
the gray box.

If you do not format your answers correctly, the grading software will not find them and you
will lose points.

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 Introduction

Being able to predict users’ choices is a big business. Many internet services are study-
ing your choices and preferences to be able to offer you the products you might like (and
correspondingly the products you are more likely to buy). Netflix, Pandora radio, Spotify,
Facebook targeted ads, and even online dating websites are all examples of recommender
systems. These services are sometimes willing to go to great lengths in order to improve their
algorithms. In fact, in 2006, Netflix offered 1 million dollars to the team which would be
able to improve their Cinematch algorithm predictions by just 10%. Music Genome Project
which is a trademark of Pandora radio is another example of a recommender system. Every
song is assigned a rating from 0 to 5 in 450 different categories (“genes”). Thus, any song
is represented by a vector with 450 components. Mathematical comparison of these vectors
allows then to suggest the next song to a user.
Observe that data about movies, consumer products, and etc, can be often arranged in a
form of a vector. These vector representations can be then used in different algorithms to
compare items and predict similarity. In this project, we will use linear algebra to establish
similarities in tastes between different users. The main idea is that if we know the current
ratings from a certain user, then comparing it with the ratings of other users in database,
we can find users with similar tastes. Finally, we can look at the items highly rated by
those users and suggest these items to the current user. In this lab, we will look at the
MovieLens database which contains around 1 million ratings of 3952 movies by 6040 users.
We will create a very simple recommender system by finding similarities between users’
tastes. Our techniques will be based on Euclidean distance (norm), scalar product, and
finding correlation coefficients (or angles between the data).

Tasks

1. Load the arrays movies, users movies, users movies sort, index small, trial user
from the file users movies.mat using the load command. The matrix users movies
should be a 6040 × 3952 matrix containing integer values between 0 and 5 with 1
meaning “strongly dislike” and 5 meaning “strongly like”. The 0 in the matrix means
that the user did not rate the movie. The array movies contains all the titles of
the movies. The matrix users movies sort contains an extract from the matrix
users movies.mat with only rating for the 20 popular movies selected. The indexes of
these popular movies are recorded in the array index small. Finally, ratings of these
popular movies by yet another user (not the one contained in the database) are given
by the vector trial user. It is suggested to view all the variables and their dimensions
by using the “Workspace” window of Matlab environment:
%% Load the data
clear;
load(’users_movies.mat’,’movies’,’users_movies’,’users_movies_sort’,...
’index_small’,’trial_user’);
[m,n]=size(users_movies);

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 Variables: movies, users movies, users movies sort, index small, trial user, m, n

2. Print the titles of the popular movies at which ratings we will be looking by using the
following code:
fprintf(’Rating is based on movies:\n’)
for j=1:length(index_small)
fprintf(’%s \n’,movies{index_small(j)})
end;
fprintf(’\n’)

Observe that the movie titles are called from the cell array movies (notice the curly
parentheses) by using an intermediate array index small.
3. Now let us select the users we will compare the trial user to. Here, we want to select
the people who rated all of the 20 movies under consideration. This means that there
should not be zeros in corresponding rows of the matrix users movies sort. This can
be accomplished by the following code:
%% Select the users to compare to
[m1,n1]=size(users_movies_sort);
ratings=[];
for j=1:m1
if prod(users_movies_sort(j,:))~=0
ratings=[ratings; users_movies_sort(j,:)];
end;
end;

Observe the use of the command prod to compute the product of the elements of the
row of the array users movies sort. Now, the array ratings contains all the users
which have rated all the popular movies from the array index small. In general, it
may happen that this array is empty or too small to create any meaningful comparison
- we won’t consider these cases in this project.
Variables: ratings, m1, n1
Q1: What does the command ratings=[] do?

4. Next, we can look at the similarity metric based on the Euclidean distance. The
idea here is that we treat the array trial user and the rows of the array ratings as
vectors in 20-dimensional real space R20 . Assume that all the vectors have the origin
as the beginning point. We can find the distance between the end points of the vector
trial user and each of the vectors ratings(j,:). In other words, we are looking for
the user with the closest ratings to the trial user. This can be accomplished by the
following code:
%% Find the Euclidean distances
[m2,n2]=size(ratings);
for i=1:m2
eucl(i)=norm(ratings(i,:)-trial_user);
end;

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 The vector eucl contains all the Euclidean distances between trial user and the rows
of the matrix ratings.
Variables: eucl

5. Now let us select the user with the smallest Euclidean distance. Instead of using the
usual function min we will use a slightly more complicated approach. Let us sort the
elements of the vector eucl by using the function sort. The advantage of this is that
it allows us to find the second closest user, the third closest user, etc. There may be
only a small difference between several closest users and we might want to use their
data as well.

[MinDist,DistIndex]=sort(eucl,’ascend’);
closest_user_Dist=DistIndex(1)

Variables: MinDist, DistIndex, closest user Dist

6. The similarity metric above is one of the simplest ones which can be used to compare
two objects. However, when it comes to user ratings it has certain disadvantages. For
instance, what if the users have similar tastes, but one of them consistently judges
movies harsher than the other one? The metric above would rate those two users
as dissimilar since the Euclidean distance between vectors of their opinions might be
pretty large. To rectify this problem, we can look at a different similarity metric known
in statistics as the Pearson correlation coefficient which can be defined as
PN
i=1 (xi − x)(yi − y)
r(x, y) = qP qP ,
N 2 N 2
i=1 (xi − x) i=1 (yi − y)

where x = (x1 , x2 , . . . , xN ), y = (y1 , y2 , . . . , yN ) are two vectors with N components,

and x = N1 N
P 1
PN
i=1 xi , y = N i=1 yi are the average (mean) values of the vectors x and
y. If we look at the formula for r(x, y), we can see that it accounts for the average
user opinion x, y, and also for how harshly/exuberantly they tend to judge their movies
(magnitude of the vectors x − x and y − y). Geometrically, the r(x, y) corresponds to
the cosine angle between the vectors x − x and y − y (the closer this angle is to zero,
the more similar are the opinions of two people). To compute the Pearson correlation
coefficient, let us centralize the columns of the matrix ratings and the vector trial user
first:
ratings_cent=ratings-mean(ratings,2)*ones(1,n2);
trial_user_cent=trial_user-mean(trial_user);

Variables: ratings cent, trial user

7. Next, use the for ... end loop to compute the Pearson correlation coefficients be-
tween the rows of the matrix ratings and the vector trial user. Save the result as
a vector pearson.
Variables: pearson

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8. Finally, observe that the value r(x, y) belongs to the interval (−1, 1). The closer the
coefficient is to 1, the more similar the tastes of the users are. Finally, let us sort the
vector pearson as before using the sort function. Save the results of this function as
[MaxPearson, PearsonIndex] and find the maximal correlation coefficient which will
be the first element in the matrix MaxPearson. Save the index of this element as
closest user Pearson.
Variables: MaxPearson, PearsonIndex, closest user Pearson

9. Compare the elements of the vectors DistIndex, PearsonIndex.

Q2: Are the variables closest user Pearson and closest user Dist the same?