One of the most efficient methods in collaborative filtering is matrix factorization, which finds the latent vector representations of users and items based on the ratings of users to items. However, a matrix factorization based algorithm suffers from the cold-start problem: it cannot find latent vectors for items to which previous ratings are not available. This paper utilizes click data, which can be collected in abundance, to address the cold-start problem. We propose a probabilistic item embedding model that learns item representations from click data, and a model named EMB-MF, that connects it with a probabilistic matrix factorization for rating prediction. The experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is not only effective in recommending items with no previous ratings, but also outperforms competing methods, especially when the data is very sparse.
Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a popular strategy for recommender systems, which infers users' preferences typically using either explicit feedback (e.g., ratings) or implicit feedback (e.g., clicks). Explicit feedback is more accurate, but the quantity is not sufficient; whereas implicit feedback has an abundant quantity, but can be fairly inaccurate. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Expectation-Maximization Collaborative Filtering (EMCF), based on matrix factorization. The contributions of this paper include: first, we combine explicit and implicit feedback together in EMCF to infer users' preferences by learning latent factor vectors from matrix factorization; second, we observe four different cases of implicit feedback in terms of the distribution of latent factor vectors, and then propose different methods to estimate implicit feedback for different cases in EMCF; third, we develop an algorithm for EMCF to iteratively propagate the estimations of implicit feedback and update the latent factor vectors in order to fully utilize implicit feedback. We designed experiments to compare EMCF with other CF methods. The experimental results show that EMCF outperforms other methods by combining explicit and implicit feedback.