Existing collaborative ranking based recommender systems tend to perform best when there is enough observed ratings for each user and the observation is made completely at random. Under this setting recommender systems can properly suggest a list of recommendations according to the user interests. However, when the observed ratings are extremely sparse (e.g. in the case of cold-start users where no rating data is available), and are not sampled uniformly at random, existing ranking methods fail to effectively leverage side information to transduct the knowledge from existing ratings to unobserved ones. We propose a semi-supervised collaborative ranking model, dubbed S @math COR , to improve the quality of cold-start recommendation. S @math COR mitigates the sparsity issue by leveraging side information about both observed and missing ratings by collaboratively learning the ranking model. This enables it to deal with the case of missing data not at random, but to also effectively incorporate the available side information in transduction. We experimentally evaluated our proposed algorithm on a number of challenging real-world datasets and compared against state-of-the-art models for cold-start recommendation. We report significantly higher quality recommendations with our algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art.
@cite_14: Over the past two decades, a large amount of research effort has been devoted to developing algorithms that generate recommendations. The resulting research progress has established the importance of the user-item (U-I) matrix, which encodes the individual preferences of users for items in a collection, for recommender systems. The U-I matrix provides the basis for collaborative filtering (CF) techniques, the dominant framework for recommender systems. Currently, new recommendation scenarios are emerging that offer promising new information that goes beyond the U-I matrix. This information can be divided into two categories related to its source: rich side information concerning users and items, and interaction information associated with the interplay of users and items. In this survey, we summarize and analyze recommendation scenarios involving information sources and the CF algorithms that have been recently developed to address them. We provide a comprehensive introduction to a large body of research, more than 200 key references, with the aim of supporting the further development of recommender systems exploiting information beyond the U-I matrix. On the basis of this material, we identify and discuss what we see as the central challenges lying ahead for recommender system technology, both in terms of extensions of existing techniques as well as of the integration of techniques and technologies drawn from other research areas.
@cite_4: Recommender systems are widely used in online e-commerce applications to improve user engagement and then to increase revenue. A key challenge for recommender systems is providing high quality recommendation to users in cold-start" situations. We consider three types of cold-start problems: 1) recommendation on existing items for new users; 2) recommendation on new items for existing users; 3) recommendation on new items for new users. We propose predictive feature-based regression models that leverage all available information of users and items, such as user demographic information and item content features, to tackle cold-start problems. The resulting algorithms scale efficiently as a linear function of the number of observations. We verify the usefulness of our approach in three cold-start settings on the MovieLens and EachMovie datasets, by comparing with five alternatives including random, most popular, segmented most popular, and two variations of Vibes affinity algorithm widely used at Yahoo! for recommendation.
@cite_7: Recommending new items to existing users has remained a challenging problem due to absence of user's past preferences for these items. The user personalized non-collaborative methods based on item features can be used to address this item cold-start problem. These methods rely on similarities between the target item and user's previous preferred items. While computing similarities based on item features, these methods overlook the interactions among the features of the items and consider them independently. Modeling interactions among features can be helpful as some features, when considered together, provide a stronger signal on the relevance of an item when compared to case where features are considered independently. To address this important issue, in this work we introduce the Feature-based factorized Bilinear Similarity Model (FBSM), which learns factorized bilinear similarity model for TOP-n recommendation of new items, given the information about items preferred by users in past as well as the features of these items. We carry out extensive empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets, and we find that the proposed FBSM approach improves upon traditional non-collaborative methods in terms of recommendation performance. Moreover, the proposed approach also learns insightful interactions among item features from data, which lead to deep understanding on how these interactions contribute to personalized recommendation.
@cite_32: A major challenge in collaborative filtering based recommender systems is how to provide recommendations when rating data is sparse or entirely missing for a subset of users or items, commonly known as the cold-start problem. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in developing new solutions that address the cold-start problem. These solutions are mainly based on the idea of exploiting other sources of information to compensate for the lack of rating data. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithmic framework based on matrix factorization that simultaneously exploits the similarity information among users and items to alleviate the cold-start problem. In contrast to existing methods, the proposed algorithm decouples the following two aspects of the cold-start problem: (a) the completion of a rating sub-matrix, which is generated by excluding cold-start users and items from the original rating matrix; and (b) the transduction of knowledge from existing ratings to cold-start items users using side information. This crucial difference significantly boosts the performance when appropriate side information is incorporated. We provide theoretical guarantees on the estimation error of the proposed two-stage algorithm based on the richness of similarity information in capturing the rating data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that addresses the cold-start problem with provable guarantees. We also conduct thorough experiments on synthetic and real datasets that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and highlights the usefulness of auxiliary information in dealing with both cold-start users and items.
@cite_3: 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.
@cite_19: Recommender systems suggest to users items that they might like (e.g., news articles, songs, movies) and, in doing so, they help users deal with information overload and enjoy a personalized experience. One of the main problems of these systems is the item cold-start, i.e., when a new item is introduced in the system and no past information is available, then no effective recommendations can be produced. The item cold-start is a very common problem in practice: modern online platforms have hundreds of new items published every day. To address this problem, we propose to learn Local Collective Embeddings: a matrix factorization that exploits items' properties and past user preferences while enforcing the manifold structure exhibited by the collective embeddings. We present a learning algorithm based on multiplicative update rules that are efficient and easy to implement. The experimental results on two item cold-start use cases: news recommendation and email recipient recommendation, demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and show that it significantly outperforms six state-of-the-art methods for item cold-start.
Due in part to its importance, there has been an active line of work to address difficulties associated with cold-start users and items, where a common theme among them is to exploit auxiliary information about users or items besides the rating data that are usually available @cite_14 . A feature based regression ranking model for predicting the values (rates) of user-item matrix in cold-start scenarios by leveraging all information available for users and items is proposed in @cite_4 . The kernelized matrix factorization approach studied in @cite_3 , which incorporates the auxiliary information into the MF. @cite_19 joint factorization of the user-item and item-feature matrices by using the same item latent feature matrix in both decompositions is utilized. The FBSM model is introduced in @cite_7 , which learns factorized bilinear similarity model for new items, given the rating information as well as the features of these items. Recently, @cite_32 proposed a decoupling approach to transduct knowledge from side information to rating prediction which is able to handle both cold-start items and users problems in factorization based models.