Recommender systems based on ranking performance optimization

The rapid development of online services and information overload has inspired the fast development of recommender systems, among which collaborative filtering algorithms and model-based recommendation approaches are wildly exploited. For instance, matrix factorization (MF) demonstrated successful achievements and advantages in assisting internet users in finding interested information. These existing models focus on the prediction of the users’ ratings on unknown items. The performance is usually evaluated by the metric root mean square error (RMSE). However, achieving good performance in terms of RMSE does not always guarantee a good ranking performance. Therefore, in this paper, we advocate to treat the recommendation as a ranking problem. Normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG) is chosen as the optimization target when evaluating the ranking accuracy. Specifically, we present three ranking-oriented recommender algorithms, NSMF, AdaMF and AdaNSMF. NSMF builds a NDCG approximated loss function for Matrix Factorization. AdaMF is based on an algorithm by adaptively combining component MF recommenders with boosting method. To combine the advantages of both algorithms, we propose AdaNSMF, which is a hybird of NSMF and AdaMF, and show the superiority in both ranking accuracy and model generalization. In addition, we compare our proposed approaches with the state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms. The comparison studies confirm the advantage of our proposed approaches.