Adaptive Transfer Learning for Heterogeneous One-Class Collaborative Filtering

In this paper, we study a recent and important recommendation problem called heterogeneous one-class collaborative filtering (HOCCF), where we have two different types of one-class feedback, i.e., a set of browses and a set of purchases, for preference learning. Previous methods exploit the browses and purchases by extending some existing methods on modeling homogeneous one-class feedback in an integrative or sequential manner. However, an integrative method may be of high complexity in model training due to the expanded prediction rule, and a sequential method is of inconvenience in deployment because more than one parametric models have to be maintained. In this paper, we convert the HOCCF problem to an adaptive transfer learning task, where we first model browses via a factorization model from a perspective of the role of browser, and then adaptively refine the learned model parameters via purchases from a perspective of the dependent role of purchaser. Based on this conversion, we design a novel solution called role-based adaptive factorization (ROAF), and then derive two specific variants with pairwise preference learning and pointwise preference learning. Finally, we conduct extensive empirical studies on two large datasets, and find that our ROAF is a very promising solution in terms of recommendation accuracy, besides its convenience of one single parametric model in deployment.