Prior-based bayesian pairwise ranking for one-class collaborative filtering

Abstract

In many real-world applications, only user-item interactions (one-class feedback) can be observed. The recommendation methods have been studied for personalized ranking with one-class feedback in recent years. Pairwise ranking methods have been widely used for dealing with the one-class problem with the assumption that users prefer their observed items over unobserved items. However, existing some items that users have not seen yet. It is unsuitable for treating all unobserved items of the user as negative feedback. In this paper, we propose a Prior-based Bayesian Pairwise Ranking (PBPR) model, which relaxes the simple pairwise preference assumption in previous works by further considering the pairwise preference between two unobserved items. Moreover, we calculate users' potential preference scores on unobserved items, i.e., prior information, based on historical interactions. The prior information can be used to measure the fine-grained preference difference between any two unobserved items of each user. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed recommendation method.