Hybrid Collaborative Recommendation via Dual-Autoencoder

Abstract

With the rapid increase of internet information, personalized recommendation systems are an effective way to alleviate the information overload problem, which has attracted extensive attention in recent years. The traditional collaborative filtering utilizes matrix factorization methods to learn hidden feature representations of users and/or items. With deep learning achieved good performance in representation learning, the autoencoder model is widely applied in recommendation systems for the advantages of fast convergence and no label requirement. However, the previous recommendation systems may take the reconstruction output of an autoencoder as the prediction of missing values directly, which may deteriorate their performance and cause unsatisfactory results of recommendation. In addition, the parameters of an autoencoder need to be pre-trained ahead, which greatly increases the time complexity. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a Hybrid Collaborative Recommendation method via Dual-Autoencoder (HCRDa). More specifically, firstly, a novel dual-autoencoder is utilized to simultaneously learn the feature representations of users and items in our HCRDa, which obviously reduces time complexity. Secondly, embedding matrix factorization into the training process of the autoencoder further improves the quality of hidden features for users and items. Finally, additional attributes of users and items are utilized to alleviate the cold start problem and to make hybrid recommendations. Comprehensive experiments on several real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in comparison with several state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords

• Recommendation system
• matrix factorization
• semi-autoencoder