Title
Identifying representative users in matrix factorization-based recommender systems: application to solving the content-less new item cold-start problem.
Abstract
Matrix factorization has proven to be one of the most accurate recommendation approaches. However, it faces one major shortcoming: the latent features that result from the factorization are not directly interpretable. Providing interpretation for these features is important not only to help explain the recommendations presented to users, but also to understand the underlying relations between the users and the items. This paper consists of 2 contributions. First, we propose to automatically interpret features as users, referred to as representative users. This interpretation relies on the study of the matrices that result from the factorization and on their link with the original rating matrix. Such an interpretation is not only performed automatically, as it does not require any human expertise, but it also helps to explain the recommendations. The second proposition of this paper is to exploit this interpretation to alleviate the content-less new item cold-start problem. The experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets confirm that the features discovered by a Non-Negative Matrix Factorization can be interpreted as users and that representative users are a reliable source of information that allows to accurately estimate ratings on new items. They are thus a promising way to solve the new item cold-start problem.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s10844-016-0418-3
J. Intell. Inf. Syst.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Recommender systems,Matrix factorization,Features interpretation,Cold-start problem
Recommender system,Data mining,Proposition,Cold start,Information retrieval,Matrix (mathematics),Computer science,Matrix decomposition,Exploit,Factorization,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
48
2
0925-9902
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.38
46
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marharyta Aleksandrova172.17
Armelle Brun213821.49
Anne Boyer310618.08
Oleg Chertov4134.84