AutoSVD++: An Efficient Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Model via Contractive Auto-encoders

Collaborative filtering (CF) has been successfully used to provide users with personalized products and services. However, dealing with the increasing sparseness of user-item matrix still remains a challenge. To tackle such issue, hybrid CF such as combining with content based filtering and leveraging side information of users and items has been extensively studied to enhance performance. However, most of these approaches depend on hand-crafted feature engineering, which are usually noise-prone and biased by different feature extraction and selection schemes. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid model by generalizing contractive auto-encoder paradigm into matrix factorization framework with good scalability and computational efficiency, which jointly model content information as representations of effectiveness and compactness, and leverage implicit user feedback to make accurate recommendations. Extensive experiments conducted over three large scale real datasets indicate the proposed approach outperforms the compared methods for item recommendation.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives

With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely, we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models, along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502

Social Collaborative Retrieval

Socially-based recommendation systems have recently attracted significant interest, and a number of studies have shown that social information can dramatically improve a system's predictions of user interests. Meanwhile, there are now many potential applications that involve aspects of both recommendation and information retrieval, and the task of collaborative retrieval---a combination of these two traditional problems---has recently been introduced. Successful collaborative retrieval requires overcoming severe data sparsity, making additional sources of information, such as social graphs, particularly valuable. In this paper we propose a new model for collaborative retrieval, and show that our algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by incorporating information from social networks. We also provide empirical analyses of the ways in which cultural interests propagate along a social graph using a real-world music dataset.Comment: 10 page

Discrete Factorization Machines for Fast Feature-based Recommendation

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.Comment: Appeared in IJCAI 201