Towards Optimal Active Learning for Matrix Factorization in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems help web users to address information overload. However their performance depends on the number of provided ratings by users. This problem is amplified for a new user because he/she has not provided any rating. To address this problem, active learning methods have been proposed to acquire those ratings from users, that will help most in determining their interests. The optimal active learning selects a query that directly optimizes the expected error for the test data. This approach is applicable for prediction models in which this question can be answered in closed-form given the distribution of test data is known. Unfortunately, there are many tasks and models for which the optimal selection cannot efficiently be found in closed-form. Therefore, most of the active learning methods optimize different, non-optimal criteria, such as uncertainty. Nevertheless, in this paper we exploit the characteristics of matrix factorization, which leads to a closed-form solution and by being inspired from existing optimal active learning for the regression task, develop a method that approximates the optimal solution for recommender systems. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the prediction accuracy of MF.