Restricted Boltzman Machines (RBMs) have been successfully used in recommender systems. However, as with most of other collaborative filtering techniques, it cannot solve cold start problems for there is no rating for a new item. In this paper, we first apply conditional RBM (CRBM) which could take extra information into account and show that CRBM could solve cold start problem very well, especially for rating prediction task. CRBM naturally combine the content and collaborative data under a single framework which could be fitted effectively. Experiments show that CRBM can be compared favourably with matrix factorization models, while hidden features learned from the former models are more easy to be interpreted.
Another matrix factorization based model is the regression-based latent factor model (RLFM). RLFM simultaneously incorporate user features, item features, into a single modeling framework. Different from @cite_18 , where the latent factors' learning phase and mapping phase are separated, a Gaussian prior with a feature-base regression was added to the latent factors for regularization. RLFM provided a modeling framework through hierarchical models which add more flexibility to the factorization methods.
@cite_18
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We propose fLDA, a novel matrix factorization method to predict ratings in recommender system applications where a "bag-of-words" representation for item meta-data is natural. Such scenarios are commonplace in web applications like content recommendation, ad targeting and web search where items are articles, ads and web pages respectively. Because of data sparseness, regularization is key to good predictive accuracy. Our method works by regularizing both user and item factors simultaneously through user features and the bag of words associated with each item. Specifically, each word in an item is associated with a discrete latent factor often referred to as the topic of the word; item topics are obtained by averaging topics across all words in an item. Then, user rating on an item is modeled as user's affinity to the item's topics where user affinity to topics (user factors) and topic assignments to words in items (item factors) are learned jointly in a supervised fashion. To avoid overfitting, user and item factors are regularized through Gaussian linear regression and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) priors respectively. We show our model is accurate, interpretable and handles both cold-start and warm-start scenarios seamlessly through a single model. The efficacy of our method is illustrated on benchmark datasets and a new dataset from Yahoo! Buzz where fLDA provides superior predictive accuracy in cold-start scenarios and is comparable to state-of-the-art methods in warm-start scenarios. As a by-product, fLDA also identifies interesting topics that explains user-item interactions. Our method also generalizes a recently proposed technique called supervised LDA (sLDA) to collaborative filtering applications. While sLDA estimates item topic vectors in a supervised fashion for a single regression, fLDA incorporates multiple regressions (one for each user) in estimating the item factors. Collaborative filtering (CF) has been widely employed within recommender systems to solve many real-world problems. Learning effective latent factors plays the most important role in collaborative filtering. Traditional CF methods based upon matrix factorization techniques learn the latent factors from the user-item ratings and suffer from the cold start problem as well as the sparsity problem. Some improved CF methods enrich the priors on the latent factors by incorporating side information as regularization. However, the learned latent factors may not be very effective due to the sparse nature of the ratings and the side information. To tackle this problem, we learn effective latent representations via deep learning. Deep learning models have emerged as very appealing in learning effective representations in many applications. In particular, we propose a general deep architecture for CF by integrating matrix factorization with deep feature learning. We provide a natural instantiations of our architecture by combining probabilistic matrix factorization with marginalized denoising stacked auto-encoders. The combined framework leads to a parsimonious fit over the latent features as indicated by its improved performance in comparison to prior state-of-art models over four large datasets for the tasks of movie book recommendation and response prediction. Cold-start scenarios in recommender systems are situations in which no prior events, like ratings or clicks, are known for certain users or items. To compute predictions in such cases, additional information about users (user attributes, e.g. gender, age, geographical location, occupation) and items (item attributes, e.g. genres, product categories, keywords) must be used. We describe a method that maps such entity (e.g. user or item) attributes to the latent features of a matrix (or higher-dimensional) factorization model. With such mappings, the factors of a MF model trained by standard techniques can be applied to the new-user and the new-item problem, while retaining its advantages, in particular speed and predictive accuracy. We use the mapping concept to construct an attribute-aware matrix factorization model for item recommendation from implicit, positive-only feedback. Experiments on the new-item problem show that this approach provides good predictive accuracy, while the prediction time only grows by a constant factor. Mobile advertising has recently seen dramatic growth, fueled by the global proliferation of mobile phones and devices. The task of predicting ad response is thus crucial for maximizing business revenue. However, ad response data change dynamically over time, and are subject to cold-start situations in which limited history hinders reliable prediction. There is also a need for a robust regression estimation for high prediction accuracy, and good ranking to distinguish the impacts of different ads. To this end, we develop a Hierarchical Importance-aware Factorization Machine (HIFM), which provides an effective generic latent factor framework that incorporates importance weights and hierarchical learning. Comprehensive empirical studies on a real-world mobile advertising dataset show that HIFM outperforms the contemporary temporal latent factor models. The results also demonstrate the efficacy of the HIFM's importance-aware and hierarchical learning in improving the overall prediction and prediction in cold-start scenarios, respectively. We propose a novel latent factor model to accurately predict response for large scale dyadic data in the presence of features. Our approach is based on a model that predicts response as a multiplicative function of row and column latent factors that are estimated through separate regressions on known row and column features. In fact, our model provides a single unified framework to address both cold and warm start scenarios that are commonplace in practical applications like recommender systems, online advertising, web search, etc. We provide scalable and accurate model fitting methods based on Iterated Conditional Mode and Monte Carlo EM algorithms. We show our model induces a stochastic process on the dyadic space with kernel (covariance) given by a polynomial function of features. Methods that generalize our procedure to estimate factors in an online fashion for dynamic applications are also considered. Our method is illustrated on benchmark datasets and a novel content recommendation application that arises in the context of Yahoo! Front Page. We report significant improvements over several commonly used methods on all datasets. We propose a novel statistical method to predict large scale dyadic response variables in the presence of covariate information. Our approach simultaneously incorporates the effect of covariates and estimates local structure that is induced by interactions among the dyads through a discrete latent factor model. The discovered latent factors provide a redictive model that is both accurate and interpretable. We illustrate our method by working in a framework of generalized linear models, which include commonly used regression techniques like linear regression, logistic regression and Poisson regression as special cases. We also provide scalable generalized EM-based algorithms for model fitting using both "hard" and "soft" cluster assignments. We demonstrate the generality and efficacy of our approach through large scale simulation studies and analysis of datasets obtained from certain real-world movie recommendation and internet advertising applications. We propose a new matrix completion algorithm— Kernelized Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (KPMF), which effectively incorporates external side information into the matrix factorization process. Unlike Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (PMF) [14], which assumes an independent latent vector for each row (and each column) with Gaussian priors, KMPF works with latent vectors spanning all rows (and columns) with Gaussian Process (GP) priors. Hence, KPMF explicitly captures the underlying (nonlinear) covariance structures across rows and columns. This crucial difference greatly boosts the performance of KPMF when appropriate side information, e.g., users’ social network in recommender systems, is incorporated. Furthermore, GP priors allow the KPMF model to fill in a row that is entirely missing in the original matrix based on the side information alone, which is not feasible for standard PMF formulation. In our paper, we mainly work on the matrix completion problem with a graph among the rows and or columns as side information, but the proposed framework can be easily used with other types of side information as well. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of KPMF through two different applications: 1) recommender systems and 2) image restoration. Matrix factorization (MF) models and their extensions are standard in modern recommender systems. MF models decompose the observed user-item interaction matrix into user and item latent factors. In this paper, we propose a co-factorization model, CoFactor, which jointly decomposes the user-item interaction matrix and the item-item co-occurrence matrix with shared item latent factors. For each pair of items, the co-occurrence matrix encodes the number of users that have consumed both items. CoFactor is inspired by the recent success of word embedding models (e.g., word2vec) which can be interpreted as factorizing the word co-occurrence matrix. We show that this model significantly improves the performance over MF models on several datasets with little additional computational overhead. We provide qualitative results that explain how CoFactor improves the quality of the inferred factors and characterize the circumstances where it provides the most significant improvements. Probabilistic topic models have been widely used for sentiment analysis. However, most of existing topic methods only model the sentiment text, but do not consider the user, who expresses the sentiment, and the item, which the sentiment is expressed on. Since different users may use different sentiment expressions for different items, we argue that it is better to incorporate the user and item information into the topic model for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a new Supervised User-Item based Topic model, called SUIT model, for sentiment analysis. It can simultaneously utilize the textual topic and latent user-item factors. Our proposed method uses the tensor outer product of text topic proportion vector, user latent factor and item latent factor to model the sentiment label generalization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets: review dataset and microblog dataset. The results demonstrate the advantages of our model. It shows significant improvement compared with supervised topic models and collaborative filtering methods. Recently, some recommendation methods try to improve the prediction results by integrating information from user's multiple types of behaviors. How to model the dependence and independence between different behaviors is critical for them. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation model, the Group-Sparse Matrix Factorization (GSMF), which factorizes the rating matrices for multiple behaviors into the user and item latent factor space with group sparsity regularization. It can (1) select out the different subsets of latent factors for different behaviors, addressing that users' decisions on different behaviors are determined by different sets of factors; (2) model the dependence and independence between behaviors by learning the shared and private factors for multiple behaviors automatically; (3) allow the shared factors between different behaviors to be different, instead of all the behaviors sharing the same set of factors. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate that our model can integrate users' multiple types of behaviors into recommendation better, compared with other state-of-the-arts. 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 pref- erences 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 factorization model for recommendations. dPF models the time evolving latent factors with a Kalman filter and the actions with Poisson distributions. We derive a scalable variational inference algorithm to infer the latent factors. Finally, we demonstrate dPF on 10 years of user click data from arXiv.org, one of the largest repository of scientific papers and a formidable source of information about the behavior of scientists. Empirically we show performance improvement over both static and, more recently proposed, dynamic recommendation models. We also provide a thorough exploration of the inferred posteriors over the latent variables. We discuss a statistical model of social network data derived from matrix representations and symmetry considerations. The model can include known predictor information in the form of a regression term, and can represent additional structure via sender-specific and receiver-specific latent factors. This approach allows for the graphical description of a social network via the latent factors of the nodes, and provides a framework for the prediction of missing links in network data. We describe studies in molecular profiling and biological pathway analysis that use sparse latent factor and regression models for microarray gene expression data. We discuss breast cancer applications and key aspects of the modeling and computational methodology. Our case studies aim to investigate and characterize heterogeneity of structure related to specific oncogenic pathways, as well as links between aggregate patterns in gene expression profiles and clinical biomarkers. Based on the metaphor of statistically derived “factors” as representing biological “subpathway” structure, we explore the decomposition of fitted sparse factor models into pathway subcomponents and investigate how these components overlay multiple aspects of known biological activity. Our methodology is based on sparsity modeling of multivariate regression, ANOVA, and latent factor models, as well as a class of models that combines all components. Hierarchical sparsity priors address questions of dimension reduction and multiple co... Many latent factors of variation interact to generate sensory data; for example, pose, morphology and expression in face images. In this work, we propose to learn manifold coordinates for the relevant factors of variation and to model their joint interaction. Many existing feature learning algorithms focus on a single task and extract features that are sensitive to the task-relevant factors and invariant to all others. However, models that just extract a single set of invariant features do not exploit the relationships among the latent factors. To address this, we propose a higher-order Boltzmann machine that incorporates multiplicative interactions among groups of hidden units that each learn to encode a distinct factor of variation. Furthermore, we propose correspondence-based training strategies that allow effective disentangling. Our model achieves state-of-the-art emotion recognition and face verification performance on the Toronto Face Database. We also demonstrate disentangled features learned on the CMU Multi-PIE dataset. In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded immense success on speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the exploration of deep neural networks on recommender systems has received relatively less scrutiny. In this work, we strive to develop techniques based on neural networks to tackle the key problem in recommendation --- collaborative filtering --- on the basis of implicit feedback. Although some recent work has employed deep learning for recommendation, they primarily used it to model auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and acoustic features of musics. When it comes to model the key factor in collaborative filtering --- the interaction between user and item features, they still resorted to matrix factorization and applied an inner product on the latent features of users and items. By replacing the inner product with a neural architecture that can learn an arbitrary function from data, we present a general framework named NCF, short for Neural network-based Collaborative Filtering. NCF is generic and can express and generalize matrix factorization under its framework. To supercharge NCF modelling with non-linearities, we propose to leverage a multi-layer perceptron to learn the user-item interaction function. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show significant improvements of our proposed NCF framework over the state-of-the-art methods. Empirical evidence shows that using deeper layers of neural networks offers better recommendation performance. In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded immense success on speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the exploration of deep neural networks on recommender systems has received relatively less scrutiny. In this work, we strive to develop techniques based on neural networks to tackle the key problem in recommendation -- collaborative filtering -- on the basis of implicit feedback. Although some recent work has employed deep learning for recommendation, they primarily used it to model auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and acoustic features of musics. When it comes to model the key factor in collaborative filtering -- the interaction between user and item features, they still resorted to matrix factorization and applied an inner product on the latent features of users and items. By replacing the inner product with a neural architecture that can learn an arbitrary function from data, we present a general framework named NCF, short for Neural network-based Collaborative Filtering. NCF is generic and can express and generalize matrix factorization under its framework. To supercharge NCF modelling with non-linearities, we propose to leverage a multi-layer perceptron to learn the user-item interaction function. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show significant improvements of our proposed NCF framework over the state-of-the-art methods. Empirical evidence shows that using deeper layers of neural networks offers better recommendation performance. Data often comes in the form of an array or matrix. Matrix factorization techniques attempt to recover missing or corrupted entries by assuming that the matrix can be written as the product of two low-rank matrices. In other words, matrix factorization approximates the entries of the matrix by a simple, fixed function---namely, the inner product---acting on the latent feature vectors for the corresponding row and column. Here we consider replacing the inner product by an arbitrary function that we learn from the data at the same time as we learn the latent feature vectors. In particular, we replace the inner product by a multi-layer feed-forward neural network, and learn by alternating between optimizing the network for fixed latent features, and optimizing the latent features for a fixed network. The resulting approach---which we call neural network matrix factorization or NNMF, for short---dominates standard low-rank techniques on a suite of benchmark but is dominated by some recent proposals that take advantage of the graph features. Given the vast range of architectures, activation functions, regularizers, and optimization techniques that could be used within the NNMF framework, it seems likely the true potential of the approach has yet to be reached. Recommender systems (RSs) provide an effective way of alleviating the information overload problem by selecting personalized items for different users. Latent factors-based collaborative filtering (CF) has become the popular approaches for RSs due to its accuracy and scalability. Recently, online social networks and user-generated content provide diverse sources for recommendation beyond ratings. Although social matrix factorization (Social MF) and topic matrix factorization (Topic MF) successfully exploit social relations and item reviews, respectively; both of them ignore some useful information. In this article, we investigate the effective data fusion by combining the aforementioned approaches. First, we propose a novel model MR3 to jointly model three sources of information (i.e., ratings, item reviews, and social relations) effectively for rating prediction by aligning the latent factors and hidden topics. Second, we incorporate the implicit feedback from ratings into the proposed model to enhance its capability and to demonstrate its flexibility. We achieve more accurate rating prediction on real-life datasets over various state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we measure the contribution from each of the three data sources and the impact of implicit feedback from ratings, followed by the sensitivity analysis of hyperparameters. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and efficacy of our proposed model and its extension. Regularized matrix factorization models are known to generate high quality rating predictions for recommender systems. One of the major drawbacks of matrix factorization is that once computed, the model is static. For real-world applications dynamic updating a model is one of the most important tasks. Especially when ratings on new users or new items come in, updating the feature matrices is crucial. In this paper, we generalize regularized matrix factorization (RMF) to regularized kernel matrix factorization (RKMF). Kernels provide a flexible method for deriving new matrix factorization methods. Furthermore with kernels nonlinear interactions between feature vectors are possible. We propose a generic method for learning RKMF models. From this method we derive an online-update algorithm for RKMF models that allows to solve the new-user new-item problem. Our evaluation indicates that our proposed online-update methods are accurate in approximating a full retrain of a RKMF model while the runtime of online-updating is in the range of milliseconds even for huge datasets like Netflix. Personalized recommender systems based on latent factor models are widely used to increase sales in e-commerce. Such systems use the past behavior of users to recommend new items that are likely to be of interest to them. However, latent factor model suffer from sparse user-item interaction in online shopping data: for a large portion of items that do not have sufficient purchase records, their latent factors cannot be estimated accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that automatically discovers the taxonomies from online shopping data and jointly learns a taxonomy-based recommendation system. Out model is non-parametric and can learn the taxonomy structure automatically from the data. Since the taxonomy allows purchase data to be shared between items, it effectively improves the accuracy of recommending tail items by sharing strength with the more frequent items. Experiments on a large-scale online shopping dataset confirm that our proposed model improves significantly over state-of-the-art latent factor models. Moreover, our model generates high-quality and human readable taxonomies. Finally, using the algorithm-generated taxonomy, our model even outperforms latent factor models based on the human-induced taxonomy, thus alleviating the need for costly manual taxonomy generation.