Deep Learning Architecture for Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems

• Main Authors: Jesus Bobadilla, Santiago Alonso, Antonio Hernando
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-04-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: collaborative filtering; reliabilities; deep learning; recommender systems; matrix factorization
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/7/2441

This paper provides an innovative deep learning architecture to improve collaborative filtering results in recommender systems. It exploits the potential of the reliability concept to raise predictions and recommendations quality by incorporating prediction errors (reliabilities) in the deep learning layers. The underlying idea is to recommend highly predicted items that also have been found as reliable ones. We use the deep learning architecture to extract the existing non-linear relations between predictions, reliabilities, and accurate recommendations. The proposed architecture consists of three related stages, providing three stacked abstraction levels: (a) real prediction errors, (b) predicted errors (reliabilities), and (c) predicted ratings (predictions). In turn, each abstraction level requires a learning process: (a) Matrix Factorization from ratings, (b) Multilayer Neural Network fed with real prediction errors and hidden factors, and (c) Multilayer Neural Network fed with reliabilities and hidden factors. A complete set of experiments has been run involving three representative and open datasets and a state-of-the-art baseline. The results show strong prediction improvements and also important recommendation improvements, particularly for the recall quality measure.