{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,12]],"date-time":"2025-10-12T04:04:44Z","timestamp":1760241884120,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":22,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,12]],"date-time":"2018-10-12T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1539302400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Symmetry"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Top-N recommendation is an important recommendation technique that delivers a ranked top-N item list to each user. Data sparsity is a great challenge for top-N recommendation. In order to tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a semi-supervised model called Semi-BPR (Semi-Supervised Bayesian Personalized Ranking). Our approach is based on the assumption that, for a given model, users always prefer items ranked higher in the generated recommendation list. Therefore, we select a certain number of items ranked higher in the recommendation list to construct an intermediate set and optimize the metric Area Under the Curve (AUC). In addition, we treat the intermediate set as a teaching set and design a semi-supervised self-training model. We conduct a series of experiments on three popular datasets to compare the proposed approach with several state-of-the-art baselines. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the other methods for all evaluation metrics, especially for sparse datasets.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/sym10100492","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,12]],"date-time":"2018-10-12T10:54:03Z","timestamp":1539341643000},"page":"492","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["A Semi-Supervised Model for Top-N Recommendation"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"10","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3239-0165","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Shulong","family":"Chen","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Laboratory, College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yuxing","family":"Peng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Science and Technology on Parallel and Distributed Laboratory, College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,10,12]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"75","DOI":"10.1145\/1345448.1345465","article-title":"Lessons from the netflix prize challenge","volume":"9","author":"Bell","year":"2007","journal-title":"ACM SIGKDD Explor. 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