A deep variational matrix factorization method for recommendation on large scale sparse dataset

Traditional recommendation methods based on matrix factorization techniques have yielded immense success because of their good scalability. However, they still face the problem of data sparsity, which may lead to a reduction in recommendation performance. As it is hard to learn good latent features in the sparse user-item rating matrix. In recent years, deep learning is very appealing in learning effective representations. Its non-linear characteristics just remedy the shortcomings of matrix factorization. In this paper, a novel method deep variational matrix factorization recommendation (DVMF) is proposed for large scale sparse dataset. DVMF is based on latent factors to predict the ratings. The latent features of the users and items are respectively obtained through a deep nonlinear structure. Based on the latent factors and combined with matrix factorization method, the paper presents algorithm optimization method of DVMF. The experiments on three real-world datasets from different domains show that DVMF is able to provide higher accuracy than recommendation algorithms based on matrix factorization or deep learning individually on large scale sparse dataset. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.