Variational autoencoders were proven successful in domains such as computer vision and speech processing. Their adoption for modeling user preferences is still unexplored, although recently it is starting to gain attention in the current literature. In this work, we propose a model which extends variational autoencoders by exploiting the rich information present in the past preference history. We introduce a recurrent version of the VAE, where instead of passing a subset of the whole history regardless of temporal dependencies, we rather pass the consumption sequence subset through a recurrent neural network. At each time-step of the RNN, the sequence is fed through a series of fully-connected layers, the output of which models the probability distribution of the most likely future preferences. We show that handling temporal information is crucial for improving the accuracy of the VAE: In fact, our model beats the current state-of-the-art by valuable margins because of its ability to capture temporal dependencies among the user-consumption sequence using the recurrent encoder still keeping the fundamentals of variational autoencoders intact.
Notably, prominent deep learning approaches to collaborative filtering are based on the idea of autoencoding the features from the preference matrix. @cite_44 exploits autoencoders to encode preference histories. Unseen preferences can be devised by looking at the reconstructed decoding, which is shaped to include scores for all possible items of interest. Autoencoders are also amenable to consider side information @cite_9 to mitigate the sparsity of the data and to tackle the cold start problem.
@cite_44 @cite_9
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This paper proposes AutoRec, a novel autoencoder framework for collaborative filtering (CF). Empirically, AutoRec's compact and efficiently trainable model outperforms state-of-the-art CF techniques (biased matrix factorization, RBM-CF and LLORMA) on the Movielens and Netflix datasets. Neural networks have not been widely studied in Collaborative Filtering. For instance, no paper using neural networks was published during the Net-flix Prize apart from 's work on Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) [14]. While deep learning has tremendous success in image and speech recognition, sparse inputs received less attention and remains a challenging problem for neural networks. Nonetheless, sparse inputs are critical for collaborative filtering. In this paper, we introduce a neural network architecture which computes a non-linear matrix factorization from sparse rating inputs. We show experimentally on the movieLens and jester dataset that our method performs as well as the best collaborative filtering algorithms. We provide an implementation of the algorithm as a reusable plugin for Torch [4], a popular neural network framework.