A Collective Variational Autoencoder for Top-NN Recommendation with Side Information

Recommender systems have been studied extensively due to their practical use in many real-world scenarios. Despite this, generating effective recommendations with sparse user ratings remains a challenge. Side information associated with items has been widely utilized to address rating sparsity. Existing recommendation models that use side information are linear and, hence, have restricted expressiveness. Deep learning has been used to capture non-linearities by learning deep item representations from side information but as side information is high-dimensional existing deep models tend to have large input dimensionality, which dominates their overall size. This makes them difficult to train, especially with small numbers of inputs. Rather than learning item representations, which is problematic with high-dimensional side information, in this paper, we propose to learn feature representation through deep learning from side information. Learning feature representations, on the other hand, ensures a sufficient number of inputs to train a deep network. To achieve this, we propose to simultaneously recover user ratings and side information, by using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Specifically, user ratings and side information are encoded and decoded collectively through the same inference network and generation network. This is possible as both user ratings and side information are data associated with items. To account for the heterogeneity of user rating and side information, the final layer of the generation network follows different distributions depending on the type of information. The proposed model is easy to implement and efficient to optimize and is shown to outperform state-of-the-art top-$N$ recommendation methods that use side information.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, DLRS workshop 201

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

Collaborative Deep Learning for Recommender Systems

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a successful approach commonly used by many recommender systems. Conventional CF-based methods use the ratings given to items by users as the sole source of information for learning to make recommendation. However, the ratings are often very sparse in many applications, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their recommendation performance. To address this sparsity problem, auxiliary information such as item content information may be utilized. Collaborative topic regression (CTR) is an appealing recent method taking this approach which tightly couples the two components that learn from two different sources of information. Nevertheless, the latent representation learned by CTR may not be very effective when the auxiliary information is very sparse. To address this problem, we generalize recent advances in deep learning from i.i.d. input to non-i.i.d. (CF-based) input and propose in this paper a hierarchical Bayesian model called collaborative deep learning (CDL), which jointly performs deep representation learning for the content information and collaborative filtering for the ratings (feedback) matrix. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different domains show that CDL can significantly advance the state of the art