Cross-domain recommender system using Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis

Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations to the users from a large number of possible options in online stores. Matrix factorization is a well-known and accurate collaborative filtering approach for recommender system, which suffers from cold-start problem for new users and items. Whenever a new user participate with the system there is not enough interactions with the system, therefore there are not enough ratings in the user-item matrix to learn the matrix factorization model. Using auxiliary data such as users demographic, ratings and reviews in relevant domains, is an effective solution to reduce the new user problem. In this paper, we used data of users from other domains and build a common space to represent the latent factors of users from different domains. In this representation we proposed an iterative method which applied MAX-VAR generalized canonical correlation analysis (GCCA) on users latent factors learned from matrix factorization on each domain. Also, to improve the capability of GCCA to learn latent factors for new users, we propose generalized canonical correlation analysis by inverse sum of selection matrices (GCCA-ISSM) approach, which provides better recommendations in cold-start scenarios. The proposed approach is extended using content-based features from topic modeling extracted from users reviews. We demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approaches on cross-domain ratings predictions using comprehensive experiments on Amazon and MovieLens datasets.