Magnitude Bounded Matrix Factorisation for Recommender Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces Magnitude Bounded Matrix Factorisation (MBMF), a fast and flexible algorithm for recommender systems that constrains individual user/item feature magnitudes, improving accuracy and scalability.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel MBMF algorithm that allows different bounds per user/item and converts the constrained problem into an unconstrained one using spherical coordinates.

Findings

MBMF outperforms existing algorithms in accuracy.

MBMF is faster and more scalable on large datasets.

Experiments confirm the effectiveness of the magnitude constraints.

Abstract

Low rank matrix factorisation is often used in recommender systems as a way of extracting latent features. When dealing with large and sparse datasets, traditional recommendation algorithms face the problem of acquiring large, unrestrained, fluctuating values over predictions especially for users/items with very few corresponding observations. Although the problem has been somewhat solved by imposing bounding constraints over its objectives, and/or over all entries to be within a fixed range, in terms of gaining better recommendations, these approaches have two major shortcomings that we aim to mitigate in this work: one is they can only deal with one pair of fixed bounds for all entries, and the other one is they are very time-consuming when applied on large scale recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named Magnitude Bounded Matrix Factorisation (MBMF), which allows different bounds for individual users/items and performs very fast on large scale datasets. The key idea of our algorithm is to construct a model by constraining the magnitudes of each individual user/item feature vector. We achieve this by converting from the Cartesian to Spherical coordinate system with radii set as the corresponding magnitudes, which allows the above constrained optimisation problem to become an unconstrained one. The Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method is then applied to solve the unconstrained task efficiently. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that in most cases the proposed MBMF is superior over all existing algorithms in terms of accuracy and time complexity.