ImWalkMF: Joint matrix factorization and implicit walk integrative learning for recommendation

Data sparsity and cold-start problems are prevalent in recommender systems. To address such problems, both the observable explicit social information (e.g., user-user trust connections) and the inferable implicit correlations (e.g., implicit neighbors computed by similarity measurement) have been introduced to complement user-item ratings data for improving the performances of traditional model-based recommendation algorithms such as matrix factorization. Although effective, (1) the utilization of the explicit user-user social relationships suffers from the weakness of unavailability in real systems such as Netflix or the issue of sparse observable content like 0.03% trust density in Epinions, thus there is no or little explicit social information that can be employed to improve baseline model in real applications; (2) the current similarity measurement approaches focus on inferring implicit correlations between a user (item) and their direct neighbors or top-k similar neighbors based on user-item ratings bipartite network, so that they fail to comprehensively unfold the indirect potential relationships among users and items. To solve these issues regarding both explicit/implicit social recommendation algorithms, we design a joint model of matrix factorization and implicit walk integrative learning, i.e., ImWalkMF, which only uses explicit ratings information yet models both direct rating feedbacks and multiple direct/indirect implicit correlations among users and items from a random walk perspective. We further propose a combined strategy for training two independent components in the proposed model based on sampling. The experimental results on two real-world sparse datasets demonstrate that ImWalkMF outperforms the traditional regularized/probabilistic matrix factorization models as well as other competitive baselines that utilize explicit/implicit social information.