Stream-based semi-supervised learning for recommender systems

To alleviate the problem of data sparsity inherent to recommender systems, we propose a semi-supervised framework for stream-based recommendations. Our framework uses abundant unlabelled information to improve the quality of recommendations. We extend a state-of-the-art matrix factorization algorithm by the ability to add new dimensions to the matrix at runtime and implement two approaches to semi-supervised learning: co-training and self-learning. We introduce a new evaluation protocol including statistical testing and parameter optimization. We then evaluate our framework on five real-world datasets in a stream setting. On all of the datasets our method achieves statistically significant improvements in the quality of recommendations.