MINDTL: Multiple incomplete domains transfer learning for information recommendation

Collaborative filtering is the most popular and successful information recommendation technique. However, it can suffer from data sparsity issue in cases where the systems do not have sufficient domain information. Transfer learning, which enables information to be transferred from source domains to target domain, presents an unprecedented opportunity to alleviate this issue. A few recent works focus on transferring user-item rating information from a dense domain to a sparse target domain, while almost all methods need that each rating matrix in source domain to be extracted should be complete. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a novel multiple incomplete domains transfer learning model for cross-domain collaborative filtering. The transfer learning process consists of two steps. First, the user-item ratings information in incomplete source domains are compressed into multiple informative compact cluster-level matrixes, which are referred as codebooks. Second, we reconstruct the target matrix based on the codebooks. Specifically, for the purpose of maximizing the knowledge transfer, we design a new algorithm to learn the rating knowledge efficiently from multiple incomplete domains. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing methods.