Recommendation systems are recognised as being hugely important in industry, and the area is now well understood. At News UK, there is a requirement to be able to quickly generate recommendations for users on news items as they are published. However, little has been published about systems that can generate recommendations in response to changes in recommendable items and user behaviour in a very short space of time. In this paper we describe a new algorithm for updating collaborative filtering models incrementally, and demonstrate its effectiveness on clickstream data from The Times. We also describe the architecture that allows recommendations to be generated on the fly, and how we have made each component scalable. The system is currently being used in production at News UK.
The xStreams system of @cite_5 does handle new users and items, however it does not incorporate the matrix factorization algorithms which provide the current state-of-the art recommendations.
@cite_5
1972593919
Matrix approximation is a common model-based approach to collaborative filtering in recommender systems. Many relevant algorithms that fuse social contextual information have been proposed. They mainly focus on using the latent factor vectors of users and items to construct a low-rank approximation of the user-item rating matrix. However, due to data sparsity, it is difficult for current approaches to accurately learn every user item vector, which may cause low-quality recommendations for some users or items. But we implicitly detect some similar users or items based on the distance among the vectors. In this paper, we take advantage of the implicit similarity to improve matrix approximation. Borrowing parts of ideas from CodeBook Transfer, we propose a reconstructive method that compresses low-rank approximation into a cluster-level rating-pattern referred to as a codebook, and then constructs an improved approximation by expending the codebook. Experiments on real life datasets demonstrate our method improves the prediction accuracy of the state-of-the-art matrix factorization and social recommendation models.