A Social Recommender Based on Factorization and Distance Metric Learning

Traditional recommender systems often suffer from the problem of data sparsity, because most users rate only a few of the millions of possible items. With the development of social platforms, incorporating abundant social relationships into recommenders can help to overcome this issue, because users’ preferences can be inferred from those of their friends. Most existing social recommenders are based on matrix factorization, a collaborative filtering model that has been proven to be effective. In this paper, we introduce a novel social recommender based on the idea that distance reflects likability. Compared with matrix factorization, the proposed model enables us to obtain a spatial understanding of the latent factor space and how users and items are positioned inside the space by combining the factorization model and distance metric learning. In our method, users and items are initially mapped into a unified low-dimensional space. The positions of users and items are jointly determined by ratings and social relations, which can help to determine appropriate locations for users who have few ratings. Finally, the learned metrics and positions are used to generate understandable and reliable recommendations. Experiments conducted on real-world data sets have shown that compared with methods based on only matrix factorization, our method significantly improves the recommendation accuracy.