Using latent features for building an interpretable recommendation system

Abstract

PurposeAspects extracted from the user’s historical records are widely used to define user’s fine-grained preferences for building interpretable recommendation systems. As the aspects were extracted from the historical records, the aspects that represent user’s negative preferences cannot be identified because of their absence from the records. However, these latent aspects are also as important as those aspects representing user’s positive preferences for building a recommendation system. This paper aims to identify the user’s positive preferences and negative preferences for building an interpretable recommendation.Design/methodology/approachFirst, high-frequency tags are selected as aspects to describe user preferences in aspect-level. Second, user positive and negative preferences are calculated according to the positive and negative preference model, and the interaction between similar aspects is adopted to address the aspect sparsity problem. Finally, an experiment is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the model. The code and the experiment data link is:https://github.com/shiyu108/Recommendation-systemFindingsExperimental results show the proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art methods in widely used public data sets. These latent aspects are also as important as those aspects representing the user’s positive preferences for building a recommendation system.Originality/valueThis paper provides a new approach that identifies and uses not only users’ positive preferences but also negative preferences, which can capture user preference precisely. Besides, the proposed model provides good interpretability.