We present the collaborative Kalman filter (CKF), a dynamic model for
collaborative filtering and related factorization models. Using the matrix
factorization approach to collaborative filtering, the CKF accounts for time
evolution by modeling each low-dimensional latent embedding as a
multidimensional Brownian motion. Each observation is a random variable whose
distribution is parameterized by the dot product of the relevant Brownian
motions at that moment in time. This is naturally interpreted as a Kalman
filter with multiple interacting state space vectors. We also present a method
for learning a dynamically evolving drift parameter for each location by
modeling it as a geometric Brownian motion. We handle posterior intractability
via a mean-field variational approximation, which also preserves tractability
for downstream calculations in a manner similar to the Kalman filter. We
evaluate the model on several large datasets, providing quantitative evaluation
on the 10 million Movielens and 100 million Netflix datasets and qualitative
evaluation on a set of 39 million stock returns divided across roughly 6,500
companies from the years 1962-2014.Comment: Appeared at 2014 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM