Advanced Factorization Models for Recommender Systems

Abstract

Recommender Systems have become a crucial tool to serve personalized content and to promote online products and media, but also to recommend restaurants, events, news and dating profiles. The underlying algorithms have a significant impact on the quality of recommendations and have been the subject of many studies in the last two decades. In this thesis we focus on factorization models, a class of recommender system algorithms that learn user preferences based on a method called factorization. This method is a common approach in Collaborative Filtering (CF), the most successful and widely-used technique in recommender systems, where user preferences are learnt based on the preferences of similar users.

We study factorization models from an algorithmic perspective to be able to extend their applications to a wider range of problems and to improve their effectiveness. The majority of the techniques that are proposed in this thesis are based on state-of-the-art factorization models known as Factorization Machines (FMs).