How to include user features in a recommender system? I'm novice in that matter but I was thinking about the formulation of a recommender system. Let's take the example of a movie recommendation system. We have a column dedicated to movies ID (or names), a matrix related to the rates the users gave to each movie, and a matrix with movie features (romance, drama, etc..)- joined a photo that shows this formulation. What about I would like to use users features to improve my recommendation? If I had information like age, profession, revenue of each user I would like to use it in my formulation. But if I include user features, this formulation is not Content-­‐based neither Collaborative filtering anymore. Anyone knows what kind of formulation it can assume?
This is referred to as side information. This is used to enhance the recommender system.
A good library for collaborative filtering (and beginner friendly) is turicreate. Have a look at this link. o summarise, the traditional, basic matrix factorisation will encode user i and items j respectively as vectors $u_i$ and $v_j$ so that the predicted score that a user would give to the unseen item is:
$$
score(i,j) = u_i^T  v_j
$$
but you can have a more complex model that will also take into account idiosyncratic characteristics of both items and users:
$$
score(i,j) = u_i^T v_j + a^T x_i + b^T y_j
$$
which increases the capacity of the model.