Title
Supercharging recommender systems using taxonomies for learning user purchase behavior
Abstract
Recommender systems based on latent factor models have been effectively used for understanding user interests and predicting future actions. Such models work by projecting the users and items into a smaller dimensional space, thereby clustering similar users and items together and subsequently compute similarity between unknown user-item pairs. When user-item interactions are sparse (sparsity problem) or when new items continuously appear (cold start problem), these models perform poorly. In this paper, we exploit the combination of taxonomies and latent factor models to mitigate these issues and improve recommendation accuracy. We observe that taxonomies provide structure similar to that of a latent factor model: namely, it imposes human-labeled categories (clusters) over items. This leads to our proposed taxonomy-aware latent factor model (TF) which combines taxonomies and latent factors using additive models. We develop efficient algorithms to train the TF models, which scales to large number of users/items and develop scalable inference/recommendation algorithms by exploiting the structure of the taxonomy. In addition, we extend the TF model to account for the temporal dynamics of user interests using high-order Markov chains. To deal with large-scale data, we develop a parallel multi-core implementation of our TF model. We empirically evaluate the TF model for the task of predicting user purchases using a real-world shopping dataset spanning more than a million users and products. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of using our TF models over existing approaches, in terms of both prediction accuracy and running time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.14778/2336664.2336669
PVLDB
Keywords
DocType
Volume
million user,user purchase behavior,user purchase,proposed taxonomy-aware latent factor,recommender system,user interest,latent factor model,cold start problem,tf model,additive model,similar user,latent factor
Journal
5
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), Vol. 5, No. 10, pp. 956-967 (2012)
27
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.23
20
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bhargav Kanagal124311.33
Amr Ahmed2174392.13
Sandeep Pandey342328.86
Vanja Josifovski42265148.84
Jeff Yuan5522.78
Lluis Garcia-Pueyo6462.43