Lecture 7: Scalable matrix Factorisation for collaborative Filtering in Recommender System

Lecture 7: Scalable matrix Factorisation for collaborative Filtering in Recommender System

1. two classes of RecSys

Content-based
Collaborative filtering

2. Challenges of Collaborative filtering

• Cold Start
• Sparsity
• scalability

3. Matrix Factorisation for CF

Characterise items/users by vectors of factors learned from the rating matrix user * item
High correlation between item and user factors -> good recommendation

steps:

1. SVD for Factorise rating matrix
2. reduce the matrix to low dimension
3. the rest features are useful

4. How to fill Missing values

1. using the average ratings for user and item: expensive and inaccurate
2. modelling directly the observed ratings only

5. key in Scalable ML

Computation and storage should be linear -> low-cost computation
perform parallel and in-memory computation -> Many working + reduce disk I/O
Minimise network communication -> reduce overhead in parallelisation not the more the better

6. Group users and items into blocks

reduce communication: one user one item in one block
precompute info: out-links of each user and in-links of each item

implicit feedback modelling

implicit feedback: view, clicks, purchase, likes, shares:

• rating = strength in user actions -> confidence level of user preference
• construct a preference matrix P: if r>0, return 1, if r=0, return 0
• Factorisation of P -> latent factors to predict the preference of a user for an item