| Summary: | Matrix Factorization (MF) is one of the most successful Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques used in recommender systems due to its effectiveness and ability to deal with very large user-item rating matrix. However, when the rating matrix sparseness increases its performance deteriorates. Expanding MF to include side-information of users and items has been shown by many researchers both to improve general recommendation performance and to help alleviate the data-sparsity and cold-start issues in CF. In regard to item feature side-information, most schemes incorporate this information through a two stage process: intermediate results (e.g., on item similarity) are first computed based on item attributes; these are then combined with MF. In this paper, focussing on item side-information, we propose a model that directly incorporates item features into the MF framework in a single step process. The model, which we name FeatureMF, does this by projecting every available attribute datum in each of the item features into the same latent factor space with users and items, thereby in effect enriching item representation in MF. Results are presented of comparative performance experiments of the model against three state-of-the-art item information enriched models, as well as against four reference benchmark models, using two public real-world datasets, Douban and Yelp, with four training:test ratio scenarios each. It is shown to yield the best recommendation performance over all these models across all contexts including data-sparsity situations, in particular, achieving over 0.9% to over 6.5% MAE recommendation performance improvement over the next best model, HERec. FeatureMF is also found to alleviate cold start and to scale well, almost linearly, in regard to computational time, as a function of dataset size.
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