BALFA: A brain storm optimization-based adaptive latent factor analysis model

Abstract

Information overload in recent years has tremendously sparked recommender systems (RSs). An RSs usually recommends valuable information for users based on historical experience high-dimensional and incomplete (HDI) data. Since each user cannot mark whole items, extracting latent factors (LF) learned by the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method is frequently used. However, interference from the adjustment of parameters induces an inferior convergence rate and low efficiency. To address this issue, the paper proposes a brain storm optimization (BSO)-based adaptative latent factor analysis (BALFA) model consisting of the following three essential ideas: 1) divergent mechanism to avoid premature convergence, 2) particle retention technique to prevent invalid search, and 3) self-adaptive multidimensional leaning rate for more efficient application on varying data. Moreover, the convergence of the modified BSO used in BALFA is proofed based on the Markov chain. Comparison experiments on six HDI datasets in the SGD-based LF model indicate that the BALFA achieves state-of-art convergence rate and computational efficiency for HDI data analysis.