Collaborative Generated Hashing for Market Analysis and Fast Cold-start Recommendation

Yan Zhang, Ivor W. Tsang, Lixin Duan, Guowu Yang

TL;DR: It can generate effective hash codes for efficient cold-start recommendation and meanwhile provide a feasible marketing strategy.

Abstract: Cold-start and efficiency issues of the Top-k recommendation are critical to large-scale recommender systems. Previous hybrid recommendation methods are effective to deal with the cold-start issues by extracting real latent factors of cold-start items(users) from side information, but they still suffer low efficiency in online recommendation caused by the expensive similarity search in real latent space. This paper presents a collaborative generated hashing (CGH) to improve the efficiency by denoting users and items as binary codes, which applies to various settings: cold-start users, cold-start items and warm-start ones. Specifically, CGH is designed to learn hash functions of users and items through the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle; thus, it can deal with various recommendation settings. In addition, CGH initiates a new marketing strategy through mining potential users by a generative step. To reconstruct effective users, the MDL principle is used to learn compact and informative binary codes from the content data. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show the advantages for recommendations in various settings over competing baselines and analyze the feasibility of the application in marketing.

Keywords: Recommender system, generated model, market analysis, hash, cold start