Factored Proximity Models for Top-N Recommendations

In this paper, we propose EIGENREC; a simple and versatile Latent Factor framework for Top-N Recommendations, which includes the well-known PureSVD algorithm as a special case. EIGENREC builds a low dimensional model of an inter-item proximity matrix that combines a traditional similarity component, with a scaling operator, designed to regulate the effects of the prior item popularity on the final recommendation list. A comprehensive set of experiments on the MovieLens and the Yahoo datasets, based on widely applied performance metrics suggest that EIGENREC outperforms several state of-the-art algorithms, in terms of Standard and Long-Tail recommendation accuracy, while exhibiting low susceptibility to the problems caused by Sparsity, even its most extreme manifestations – the Cold-start problems.