Binary multi-modal matrix factorization for fast item cold-start recommendation

Abstract

Hashing technology can support large-scale recommendation very effectively due to its advantages of low storage cost and high recommendation efficiency. However, existing hashing-based recommendation methods often suffer from item cold-start problem. This is because they simply consider the user-item interaction and the single content information of the items, but the full interaction history is not always available and the single auxiliary information may be missing. To solve this issue, in this paper we propose a Binary Multi-modal Matrix Factorization (BMMF) method. First, we propose an efficient consensus multi-modal mapping to transform the heterogeneous multi-modal features to the unified factors by exploiting the complementarity of multiple modalities. Then, binary matrix factorization is simultaneously performed on the multi-modal features of the items and past user preferences to learn the compact binary codes of the users/items in a common Hamming space. In addition, inspired by the observation that similar instances often have similar binary codes within a short Hamming distance, we formulate a semantic structure regularization term to preserve the similarities of the items during the binary embedding process. Finally, we develop an effective Discrete Coordinate Descent (DCD) approach to tackle the formulated discrete hash optimization problem directly. Experiments on three publicly available real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method against the state-of-the-art methods. Our source codes and testing datasets are available athttps://github.com/pcm1217/BMMF.