Enriching one-class collaborative filtering with content information from social media

In recent years, recommender systems have become popular to handle the information overload problem of social media websites. The most widely used Collaborative Filtering methods make recommendations by mining users’ rating history. However, users’ behaviors in social media are usually implicit, where no ratings are available. This is a One-Class Collaborative Filtering (OCCF) problem with only positive examples. How to distinguish the negative examples from missing data is important for OCCF. Existing OCCF methods tackle this by the statistical properties of users’ historical behavior; however, they ignored the rich content information in social media websites, which provide additional evidence for profiling users and items. In this paper, we propose to improve OCCF accuracy by exploiting the social media content information to find the potential negative examples from the missing user-item pairs. Specifically, we get a content topic feature for each user and item by probabilistic topic modeling and embed them into the Matrix Factorization model. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm can achieve better performance than the state-of-art methods.