Incremental one-class collaborative filtering with co-evolving side networks

Abstract

One-class collaborative filtering (OCCF) is a fundamental research problem in a myriad of applications where the preferences of users can only be implicitly inferred from their one-class feedback (e.g., click an ad or purchase a product). The main challenges of OCCF lie in the sparsity of user feedback and the ambiguity of unobserved preferences. To effectively address the above two challenges, side networks from users and items are extensively exploited by state-of-the-art methods, which are predominantly focused on static settings. However, as real-world recommender systems evolve over time (where both the user–item ratings and user–user/item–item side networks will change), it is necessary to update OCCF results (e.g., the latent features of users and items) accordingly. The main obstacle for OCCF online update with co-evolving side networks lies in the fact that the coupled system is highly sensitive to local changes, which may cause massive perturbation on the latent features of a large number of users and items. In this paper, we propose a novel incremental one-class collaborative filtering (OCCF) method that can cope with co-evolving side networks efficiently. In particular, we model the evolution of latent features as a linear transformation process, which enables fast update of the latent features on the fly. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method can provide high-quality recommendation results on real-world datasets.