Improving Latent Factor Models via Personalized Feature Projection for One Class Recommendation

Latent Factor models, which transform both users and items into the same latent feature space, are one of the most successful and ubiquitous models in recommender systems. Most existing models in this paradigm define both users' and items' latent factors to be of the same size and use an inner product to represent a user's "compatibility" with an item. Intuitively, users' factors encode "preferences" while item factors encode "properties", so that the inner product encodes how well an item matches a user's preferences. However, a user's opinion of an item may be more complex, for example each dimension of each user's opinion may depend on a combination of multiple item factors simultaneously. Thus it may be better to view each dimension of a user's preference as a personalized projection of an item's properties so that the preference model can capture complex relationships between items' properties and users' preferences.