BoostFM: Boosted Factorization Machines for Top-N Feature-based Recommendation

Feature-based matrix factorization techniques such as Factorization Machines (FM) have been proven to achieve impressive accuracy for the rating prediction task. However, most common recommendation scenarios are formulated as a top-N item ranking problem with implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, purchases)rather than explicit ratings. To address this problem, with both implicit feedback and feature information, we propose a feature-based collaborative boosting recommender called BoostFM, which integrates boosting into factorization models during the process of item ranking. Specifically, BoostFM is an adaptive boosting framework that linearly combines multiple homogeneous component recommenders, which are repeatedly constructed on the basis of the individual FM model by a re-weighting scheme. Two ways are proposed to efficiently train the component recommenders from the perspectives of both pairwise and listwise Learning-to-Rank (L2R). The properties of our proposed method are empirically studied on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that BoostFM outperforms a number of state-of-the-art approaches for top-N recommendation

Exponential Machines

Modeling interactions between features improves the performance of machine learning solutions in many domains (e.g. recommender systems or sentiment analysis). In this paper, we introduce Exponential Machines (ExM), a predictor that models all interactions of every order. The key idea is to represent an exponentially large tensor of parameters in a factorized format called Tensor Train (TT). The Tensor Train format regularizes the model and lets you control the number of underlying parameters. To train the model, we develop a stochastic Riemannian optimization procedure, which allows us to fit tensors with 2^160 entries. We show that the model achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic data with high-order interactions and that it works on par with high-order factorization machines on a recommender system dataset MovieLens 100K.Comment: ICLR-2017 workshop track pape

Applying Deep Learning To Airbnb Search

The application to search ranking is one of the biggest machine learning success stories at Airbnb. Much of the initial gains were driven by a gradient boosted decision tree model. The gains, however, plateaued over time. This paper discusses the work done in applying neural networks in an attempt to break out of that plateau. We present our perspective not with the intention of pushing the frontier of new modeling techniques. Instead, ours is a story of the elements we found useful in applying neural networks to a real life product. Deep learning was steep learning for us. To other teams embarking on similar journeys, we hope an account of our struggles and triumphs will provide some useful pointers. Bon voyage!Comment: 8 page