Probabilistic Matrix Factorization Recommendation Approach for Integrating Multiple Information Sources

Most previous studies on matrix factorization (MF)-based collaborative filtering (CF) have focused solely on user rating information for predicting recommendations. However, to further enhance the performance of recommender systems (RSs), it is important to also consider review information and rating reliability in the model. This article proposes a new probabilistic MF (PMF)-based CF method that integrates multiple information sources to provide reliable predictions. First, we introduce a sentiment-based PMF to handle user reviews and fit the normalized sentiment information obtained from our previously proposed sentiment analysis method. We also consider the helpfulness of reviews to highlight their reliability and effectiveness in this model. Subsequently, our proposed noise detection method is adopted to determine the reliability of user ratings, and then the rating matrix is transformed into a binary reliability matrix. A rating reliability-based PMF through Bernoulli distribution is then proposed to factorize it. To effectively integrate three types of information (ratings, reviews, and rating reliability) into a PMF procedure, we design a weight matrix using the proposed weighting strategy to generate a set of comprehensive prediction ratings with corresponding reliability probabilities. Experiments on four Amazon datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms comparison methods in terms of comprehensive evaluation.