Discrete Factorization Machines for Fast Feature-based Recommendation
Shandong University（山东大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Han Liu, Xiangnan He, Fuli Feng, Liqiang Nie, Rui Liu, Hanwang Zhang
User and item features of side information are crucial for accurate recommendation. However, the large number of feature dimensions, e.g., usually larger than 10^7, results in expensive storage and computational cost. This prohibits fast recommendation especially on mobile applications where the computational resource is very limited. In this paper, we develop a generic feature-based recommendation model, called Discrete Factorization Machine (DFM), for fast and accurate recommendation. DFM binarizes the real-valued model parameters (e.g., float32) of every feature embedding into binary codes (e.g., boolean), and thus supports efficient storage and fast user-item score computation. To avoid the severe quantization loss of the binarization, we propose a convergent updating rule that resolves the challenging discrete optimization of DFM. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, we show that 1) DFM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art binarized recommendation models, and 2) DFM shows very competitive performance compared to its real-valued version (FM), demonstrating the minimized quantization loss. This work is accepted by IJCAI 2018.
This work explores the ability of collective matrix factorization models in recommender systems to make predictions about users and items for which there is side information available but no feedback or interactions data, and proposes a new formulation with a faster cold-start prediction formula that can be used in real-time systems. While these cold-start recommendations are not as good as warm-start ones, they were found to be of better quality than non-personalized recommendations, and predictions about new users were found to be more reliable than those about new items. The formulation pro…
College of Economics and Management, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学经济管理学院）
The traditional social recommendation algorithm ignores the following fact: the preferences of users with trust relationships are not necessarily similar, and the consideration of user preference similarity should be limited to specific areas. A social trust and preference segmentation-based matrix factorization (SPMF) recommendation system is proposed to solve the above-mentioned problems. Experimental results based on the Ciao and Epinions datasets show that the accuracy of the SPMF algorithm is significantly higher than that of some state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms. The proposed S…
Helsinki Research Center（赫尔辛基研究中心）；Europe Cloud Service Competence Center（欧洲云服务能力中心）；Huawei Technologies Oy (Finland) Co. Ltd（华为技术有限公司（芬兰））
We introduce the federated multi-view matrix factorization method that extends the federated learning framework to matrix factorization with multiple data sources. Our method is able to learn the multi-view model without transferring the user's personal data to a central server. As far as we are aware this is the first federated model to provide recommendations using multi-view matrix factorization. The model is rigorously evaluated on three datasets on production settings. Empirical validation confirms that federated multi-view matrix factorization outperforms simpler methods that do not take…
This paper aims at a better understanding of matrix factorization (MF), factorization machines (FM), and their combination with deep algorithms' application in recommendation systems. Specifically, this paper will focus on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and its derivations, e.g Funk-SVD, SVD++, etc. Step-by-step formula calculation and explainable pictures are displayed. What's more, we explain the DeepFM model in which FM is assisted by deep learning. Through numerical examples, we attempt to tie the theory to real-world problems.
When recommending personalized top-$k$ items to users, how can we recommend the items diversely to them while satisfying their needs? Aggregately diversified recommender systems aim to recommend a variety of items across whole users without sacrificing the recommendation accuracy. They increase the exposure opportunities of various items, which in turn increase potential revenue of sellers as well as user satisfaction. However, it is challenging to tackle aggregate-level diversity with a matrix factorization (MF), one of the most common recommendation model, since skewed real world data lead t…
IRIT（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Count data are often used in recommender systems: they are widespread (song play counts, product purchases, clicks on web pages) and can reveal user preference without any explicit rating from the user. Such data are known to be sparse, over-dispersed and bursty, which makes their direct use in recommender systems challenging, often leading to pre-processing steps such as binarization. The aim of this paper is to build recommender systems from these raw data, by means of the recently proposed compound Poisson Factorization (cPF). The paper contributions are three-fold: we present a unified fra…
College of Information and Computer Sciences（信息与计算机科学学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Department of Statistics and Data Science（统计与数据科学系）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
We consider the problem of online collaborative filtering in the online setting, where items are recommended to the users over time. At each time step, the user (selected by the environment) consumes an item (selected by the agent) and provides a rating of the selected item. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for online matrix factorization recommendation that combines linear bandits and alternating least squares. In this formulation, the bandit feedback is equal to the difference between the ratings of the best and selected items. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)（瑞士联邦理工学院（洛桑联邦理工学院））
This work formulates a novel song recommender system as a matrix completion problem that benefits from collaborative filtering through Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and content-based filtering via total variation (TV) on graphs. The graphs encode both playlist proximity information and song similarity, using a rich combination of audio, meta-data and social features. As we demonstrate, our hybrid recommendation system is very versatile and incorporates several well-known methods while outperforming them. Particularly, we show on real-world data that our model overcomes w.r.t. two eva…
We develop a Bayesian Poisson matrix factorization model for forming recommendations from sparse user behavior data. These data are large user/item matrices where each user has provided feedback on only a small subset of items, either explicitly (e.g., through star ratings) or implicitly (e.g., through views or purchases). In contrast to traditional matrix factorization approaches, Poisson factorization implicitly models each user's limited attention to consume items. Moreover, because of the mathematical form of the Poisson likelihood, the model needs only to explicitly consider the observed …
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学学院）；Zhejiang University-LianlianPay Joint Research Center（浙江大学-连连支付联合研究中心）
Recommendation from implicit feedback is a highly challenging task due to the lack of the reliable observed negative data. A popular and effective approach for implicit recommendation is to treat unobserved data as negative but downweight their confidence. Naturally, how to assign confidence weights and how to handle the large number of the unobserved data are two key problems for implicit recommendation models. However, existing methods either pursuit fast learning by manually assigning simple confidence weights, which lacks flexibility and may create empirical bias in evaluating user's prefe…
Real-world item recommenders commonly suffer from a persistent cold-start problem which is caused by dynamically changing users and items. In order to overcome the problem, several context-aware recommendation techniques have been recently proposed. In terms of both feasibility and performance, factorization machine (FM) is one of the most promising methods as generalization of the conventional matrix factorization techniques. However, since online algorithms are suitable for dynamic data, the static FMs are still inadequate. Thus, this paper proposes incremental FMs (iFMs), a general online f…
Matrix factorization has now become a dominant solution for personalized recommendation on the Social Web. To alleviate the cold start problem, previous approaches have incorporated various additional sources of information into traditional matrix factorization models. These upgraded models, however, achieve only "marginal" enhancements on the performance of personalized recommendation. Therefore, inspired by the recent development of deep-semantic modeling, we propose a hybrid deep-semantic matrix factorization (HDMF) model to further improve the performance of tag-aware personalized recommen…
National Chiao Tung Univ.（国立交通大学）；Inst. of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan（中央研究院资讯科学研究所）；The Pennsylvania State Univ.（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
In contrast to traditional online videos, live multi-streaming supports real-time social interactions between multiple streamers and viewers, such as donations. However, donation and multi-streaming channel recommendations are challenging due to complicated streamer and viewer relations, asymmetric communications, and the tradeoff between personal interests and group interactions. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Stream Party (MSP) and formulate a new multi-streaming recommendation problem, called Donation and MSP Recommendation (DAMRec). We propose Multi-stream Party Recommender System (MARS…
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机学院）
Matrix factorization is one of the most commonly used technologies in recommendation system. With the promotion of recommendation system in e-commerce shopping, online video and other aspects, distributed recommendation system has been widely promoted, and the privacy problem of multi-source data becomes more and more important. Based on Federated learning technology, this paper proposes a shared matrix factorization scheme called SharedMF. Firstly, a distributed recommendation system is built, and then secret sharing technology is used to protect the privacy of local data. Experimental result…
Recently, malevolent user hacking has become a huge problem for real-world companies. In order to learn predictive models for recommender systems, factorization techniques have been developed to deal with user-item ratings. In this paper, we suggest a broad architecture of a factorization model with adversarial training to get over these issues. The effectiveness of our systems is demonstrated by experimental findings on real-world datasets.
One of the most challenging recommendation tasks is recommending to a new, previously unseen user. This is known as the 'user cold start' problem. Assuming certain features or attributes of users are known, one approach for handling new users is to initially model them based on their features. Motivated by an ad targeting application, this paper describes an extreme online recommendation setting where the cold start problem is perpetual. Every user is encountered by the system just once, receives a recommendation, and either consumes or ignores it, registering a binary reward. We introduce One…
Matrix factorization (MF) is extensively used to mine the user preference from explicit ratings in recommender systems. However, the reliability of explicit ratings is not always consistent, because many factors may affect the user's final evaluation on an item, including commercial advertising and a friend's recommendation. Therefore, mining the reliable ratings of user is critical to further improve the performance of the recommender system. In this work, we analyze the deviation degree of each rating in overall rating distribution of user and item, and propose the notion of user-based ratin…
Much like other learning-based models, recommender systems can be affected by biases in the training data. While typical evaluation metrics (e.g. hit rate) are not concerned with them, some categories of final users are heavily affected by these biases. In this work, we propose using multiple triplet losses terms to extract meaningful and robust representations of users and items. We empirically evaluate the soundness of such representations through several "bias-aware" evaluation metrics, as well as in terms of stability to changes in the training set and agreement of the predictions variance…
In the past decade, matrix factorization has been extensively researched and has become one of the most popular techniques for personalized recommendations. Nevertheless, the dot product adopted in matrix factorization based recommender models does not satisfy the inequality property, which may limit their expressiveness and lead to sub-optimal solutions. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel recommender technique dubbed as {\em Metric Factorization}. We assume that users and items can be placed in a low dimensional space and their explicit closeness can be measured using Euclidean dist…
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩郡分校）；LANL（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）
Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) with missing-value completion is a well-known effective Collaborative Filtering (CF) method used to provide personalized user recommendations. However, traditional CF relies on the privacy-invasive collection of users' explicit and implicit feedback to build a central recommender model. One-shot federated learning has recently emerged as a method to mitigate the privacy problem while addressing the traditional communication bottleneck of federated learning. In this paper, we present the first unsupervised one-shot federated CF implementation, named FedSP…
With the rapid growth of Location-Based Social Networks, personalized Points of Interest (POIs) recommendation has become a critical task to help users explore their surroundings. Due to the scarcity of check-in data, the availability of geographical information offers an opportunity to improve the accuracy of POI recommendation. Moreover, matrix factorization methods provide effective models which can be used in POI recommendation. However, there are two main challenges which should be addressed to improve the performance of POI recommendation methods. First, leveraging geographical informati…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Exploiting low-rank structure of the user-item rating matrix has been the crux of many recommendation engines. However, existing recommendation engines force raters with heterogeneous behavior profiles to map their intrinsic rating scales to a common rating scale (e.g. 1-5). This non-linear transformation of the rating scale shatters the low-rank structure of the rating matrix, therefore resulting in a poor fit and consequentially, poor recommendations. In this paper, we propose Clustered Monotone Transforms for Rating Factorization (CMTRF), a novel approach to perform regression up to unknown…
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；East China Jiaotong University（华东交通大学）；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
Sparsity of user-to-item rating data becomes one of challenging issues in the recommender systems, which severely deteriorates the recommendation performance. Fortunately, context-aware recommender systems can alleviate the sparsity problem by making use of some auxiliary information, such as the information of both the users and items. In particular, the visual information of items, such as the movie poster, can be considered as the supplement for item description documents, which helps to obtain more item features. In this paper, we focus on movie recommender system and propose a probabilist…
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successfully applied to recommender systems. In recommender systems, the user's feedback behavior on an item is usually the result of multiple factors acting at the same time. However, a long-standing challenge is how to effectively aggregate multi-order interactions in GNN. In this paper, we propose a Graph Factorization Machine (GFM) which utilizes the popular Factorization Machine to aggregate multi-order interactions from neighborhood for recommendation. Meanwhile, cross-domain recommendation has emerged as a viable method to solve the data …
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
Latent factor models have achieved great success in personalized recommendations, but they are also notoriously difficult to explain. In this work, we integrate regression trees to guide the learning of latent factor models for recommendation, and use the learnt tree structure to explain the resulting latent factors. Specifically, we build regression trees on users and items respectively with user-generated reviews, and associate a latent profile to each node on the trees to represent users and items. With the growth of regression tree, the latent factors are gradually refined under the regula…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Gravity R&D（Gravity研发公司）
Context-aware recommendation algorithms focus on refining recommendations by considering additional information, available to the system. This topic has gained a lot of attention recently. Among others, several factorization methods were proposed to solve the problem, although most of them assume explicit feedback which strongly limits their real-world applicability. While these algorithms apply various loss functions and optimization strategies, the preference modeling under context is less explored due to the lack of tools allowing for easy experimentation with various models. As context dim…
In this paper, we investigate the common scenario where every candidate item for recommendation is characterized by a maximum capacity, i.e., number of seats in a Point-of-Interest (POI) or size of an item's inventory. Despite the prevalence of the task of recommending items under capacity constraints in a variety of settings, to the best of our knowledge, none of the known recommender methods is designed to respect capacity constraints. To close this gap, we extend three state-of-the art latent factor recommendation approaches: probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF), geographical matrix fac…
Movie Recommender System is widely applied in commercial environments such as NetFlix and Tubi. Classic recommender models utilize technologies such as collaborative filtering, learning to rank, matrix factorization and deep learning models to achieve lower marketing expenses and higher revenues. However, audience of movies have different ratings of the same movie in different contexts. Important movie watching contexts include audience mood, location, weather, etc. Tobe able to take advantage of contextual information is of great benefit to recommender builders. However, popular techniques su…
This paper describes the solution of Shanda Innovations team to Task 1 of KDD-Cup 2012. A novel approach called Multifaceted Factorization Models is proposed to incorporate a great variety of features in social networks. Social relationships and actions between users are integrated as implicit feedbacks to improve the recommendation accuracy. Keywords, tags, profiles, time and some other features are also utilized for modeling user interests. In addition, user behaviors are modeled from the durations of recommendation records. A context-aware ensemble framework is then applied to combine multi…
Politecnico di Bari（巴里理工大学）；Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）
Collaborative filtering models based on matrix factorization and learned similarities using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have gained significant attention in recent years. This is, in part, because ANNs have demonstrated good results in a wide variety of recommendation tasks. The introduction of ANNs within the recommendation ecosystem has been recently questioned, raising several comparisons in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. One aspect most of these comparisons have in common is their focus on accuracy, neglecting other evaluation dimensions important for the recommendation, such…
Matrix factorization-based recommender system is in effect an angle preserving dimensionality reduction technique. Since the frequency of items follows power-law distribution, most vectors in the original dimension of user feature vectors and item feature vectors lie on the same hyperplane. However, it is very difficult to reconstruct the embeddings in the original dimension analytically, so we reformulate the original angle preserving dimensionality reduction problem into a distance preserving dimensionality reduction problem. We show that the geometric shape of input data of recommender syst…
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Amazon Inc.（亚马逊公司）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) can help customers find more satisfying items in different domains. Existing CDR models mainly use common users or mapping functions as bridges between domains but have very limited exploration in fully utilizing extra knowledge across domains. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the knowledge graph (KG) for CDR, which enables items in different domains to share knowledge. To this end, we first construct a new dataset AmazonKG4CDR from the Freebase KG and a subset (two domain pairs: movies-music, movie-book) of Amazon Review Data. This new dataset facilit…
Università della Svizzera Italiana（意大利瑞士大学）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）
With the popularity of Location-based Social Networks, Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an important task, which learns the users' preferences and mobility patterns to recommend POIs. Previous studies show that incorporating contextual information such as geographical and temporal influences is necessary to improve POI recommendation by addressing the data sparsity problem. However, existing methods model the geographical influence based on the physical distance between POIs and users, while ignoring the temporal characteristics of such geographical influences. In this paper, …
Albeit the implicit feedback based recommendation problem - when only the user history is available but there are no ratings - is the most typical setting in real-world applications, it is much less researched than the explicit feedback case. State-of-the-art algorithms that are efficient on the explicit case cannot be automatically transformed to the implicit case if scalability should be maintained. There are few implicit feedback benchmark data sets, therefore new ideas are usually experimented on explicit benchmarks. In this paper, we propose a generic context-aware implicit feedback recom…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
Models for recommender systems use latent factors to explain the preferences and behaviors of users with respect to a set of items (e.g., movies, books, academic papers). Typically, the latent factors are assumed to be static and, given these factors, the observed preferences and behaviors of users are assumed to be generated without order. These assumptions limit the explorative and predictive capabilities of such models, since users' interests and item popularity may evolve over time. To address this, we propose dPF, a dynamic matrix factorization model based on the recent Poisson factorizat…
Accurate user interest modeling is vital for recommendation scenarios. One of the effective solutions is the sequential recommendation that relies on click behaviors, but this is not elegant in the video feed recommendation where users are passive in receiving the streaming contents and return skip or no-skip behaviors. Here skip and no-skip behaviors can be treated as negative and positive feedback, respectively. With the mixture of positive and negative feedback, it is challenging to capture the transition pattern of behavioral sequence. To do so, FeedRec has exploited a shared vanilla Trans…
Between matrix factorization or Random Walk with Restart (RWR), which method works better for recommender systems? Which method handles explicit or implicit feedback data better? Does additional information help recommendation? Recommender systems play an important role in many e-commerce services such as Amazon and Netflix to recommend new items to a user. Among various recommendation strategies, collaborative filtering has shown good performance by using rating patterns of users. Matrix factorization and random walk with restart are the most representative collaborative filtering methods. Ho…
University of Hyderabad（海得拉巴大学）；Central University of Rajasthan（拉贾斯坦中央大学）
With the abundance of data in recent years, interesting challenges are posed in the area of recommender systems. Producing high quality recommendations with scalability and performance is the need of the hour. Singular Value Decomposition(SVD) based recommendation algorithms have been leveraged to produce better results. In this paper, we extend the SVD technique further for scalability and performance in the context of 1) multi-threading 2) multiple computational units (with the use of Graphical Processing Units) and 3) distributed computation. We propose block based matrix factorization (BMF…
Social network websites, such as Facebook, YouTube, Lastfm etc, have become a popular platform for users to connect with each other and share content or opinions. They provide rich information for us to study the influence of user's social circle in their decision process. In this paper, we are interested in examining the effectiveness of social network information to predict the user's ratings of items. We propose a novel hierarchical Bayesian model which jointly incorporates topic modeling and probabilistic matrix factorization of social networks. A major advantage of our model is to automat…
Twitter, one of the biggest and most popular microblogging Websites, has evolved into a powerful communication platform which allows millions of active users to generate huge volume of microposts and queries on a daily basis. To accommodate effective categorization and easy search, users are allowed to make use of hashtags, keywords or phrases prefixed by hash character, to categorize and summarize their posts. However, valid hashtags are not restricted and thus are created in a free and heterogeneous style, increasing difficulty of the task of tweet categorization. In this paper, we propose a…
Matrix factorization is one of the best approaches for collaborative filtering, because of its high accuracy in presenting users and items latent factors. The main disadvantages of matrix factorization are its complexity, and being very hard to be parallelized, specially with very large matrices. In this paper, we introduce a new method for collaborative filtering based on Matrix Factorization by combining simulated annealing with levy distribution. By using this method, good solutions are achieved in acceptable time with low computations, compared to other methods like stochastic gradient des…
Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）；Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Following recent successes in exploiting both latent factor and word embedding models in recommendation, we propose a novel Regularized Multi-Embedding (RME) based recommendation model that simultaneously encapsulates the following ideas via decomposition: (1) which items a user likes, (2) which two users co-like the same items, (3) which two items users often co-liked, and (4) which two items users often co-disliked. In experimental validation, the RME outperforms competing state-of-the-art models in both explicit and implicit feedback datasets, significantly improving Recall@5 by 5.9~7.0%, N…
Federated recommender system (FRS), which enables many local devices to train a shared model jointly without transmitting local raw data, has become a prevalent recommendation paradigm with privacy-preserving advantages. However, previous work on FRS performs similarity search via inner product in continuous embedding space, which causes an efficiency bottleneck when the scale of items is extremely large. We argue that such a scheme in federated settings ignores the limited capacities in resource-constrained user devices (i.e., storage space, computational overhead, and communication bandwidth…
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；Minjiang University（闽江学院）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
The rapid growth of edge data generated by mobile devices and applications deployed at the edge of the network has exacerbated the problem of information overload. As an effective way to alleviate information overload, recommender system can improve the quality of various services by adding application data generated by users on edge devices, such as visual and textual information, on the basis of sparse rating data. The visual information in the movie trailer is a significant part of the movie recommender system. However, due to the complexity of visual information extraction, data sparsity c…
Knowledge acquisition and exchange are generally crucial yet costly for both businesses and individuals, especially when the knowledge concerns various areas. Question Answering Communities offer an opportunity for sharing knowledge at a low cost, where communities users, many of whom are domain experts, can potentially provide high-quality solutions to a given problem. In this paper, we propose a framework for finding experts across multiple collaborative networks. We employ the recent techniques of tree-guided learning (via tensor decomposition), and matrix factorization to explore user expe…
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) aims to factorize a matrix into two optimized nonnegative matrices and has been widely used for unsupervised learning tasks such as product recommendation based on a rating matrix. However, although networks between nodes with the same nature exist, standard NMF overlooks them, e.g., the social network between users. This problem leads to comparatively low recommendation accuracy because these networks are also reflections of the nature of the nodes, such as the preferences of users in a social network. Also, social networks, as complex networks, have man…
Preference Flow Matching with Spectral Factorization for Micro-video Recommendation
National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Computing, College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学计算机科学与技术学院并行与分布式计算国家重点实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Zhengzhou University（郑州大学）
Latent factor models (LFMs) such as matrix factorization achieve the state-of-the-art performance among various Collaborative Filtering (CF) approaches for recommendation. Despite the high recommendation accuracy of LFMs, a critical issue to be resolved is the lack of explainability. Extensive efforts have been made in the literature to incorporate explainability into LFMs. However, they either rely on auxiliary information which may not be available in practice, or fail to provide easy-to-understand explanations. In this paper, we propose a fast influence analysis method named FIA, which succ…
With the popularity of Linked Open Data (LOD) and the associated rise in freely accessible knowledge that can be accessed via LOD, exploiting LOD for recommender systems has been widely studied based on various approaches such as graph-based or using different machine learning models with LOD-enabled features. Many of the previous approaches require construction of an additional graph to run graph-based algorithms or to extract path-based features by combining user- item interactions (e.g., likes, dislikes) and background knowledge from LOD. In this paper, we investigate Factorization Machines…
Although Recommender Systems have been comprehensively studied in the past decade both in industry and academia, most of current recommender systems suffer from the following issues: 1) The data sparsity of the user-item matrix seriously affect the recommender system quality. As a result, most of traditional recommender system approaches are not able to deal with the users who have rated few items, which is known as cold start problem in recommender system. 2) Traditional recommender systems assume that users are independently and identically distributed and ignore the social relation between …
Most state-of-the-art top-N collaborative recommender systems work by learning embeddings to jointly represent users and items. Learned embeddings are considered to be effective to solve a variety of tasks. Among others, providing and explaining recommendations. In this paper we question the reliability of the embeddings learned by Matrix Factorization (MF). We empirically demonstrate that, by simply changing the initial values assigned to the latent factors, the same MF method generates very different embeddings of items and users, and we highlight that this effect is stronger for less popula…
