Adaptive Deep Modeling of Users and Items Using Side Information for Recommendation

In the existing recommender systems, matrix factorization (MF) is widely applied to model user preferences and item features by mapping the user-item ratings into a low-dimension latent vector space. However, MF has ignored the individual diversity where the user's preference for different unrated items is usually different. A fixed representation of user preference factor extracted by MF cannot model the individual diversity well, which leads to a repeated and inaccurate recommendation. To this end, we propose a novel latent factor model called adaptive deep latent factor model (ADLFM), which learns the preference factor of users adaptively in accordance with the specific items under consideration. We propose a novel user representation method that is derived from their rated item descriptions instead of original user-item ratings. Based on this, we further propose a deep neural networks framework with an attention factor to learn the adaptive representations of users. Extensive experiments on Amazon data sets demonstrate that ADLFM outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines greatly. Also, further experiments show that the attention factor indeed makes a great contribution to our method.