Kernel-Based Matrix Factorization With Weighted Regularization for Context-Aware Recommender Systems

As an essential task for recommender systems, the rating prediction problem over several contexts has attracted more attention over the recent years. The traditional approaches ignore the contexts and thus fail to predict the ratings for the unseen data in the rating tensor for varying contextual scenarios. Matrix factorization is preferred over decomposing the rating tensor for avoiding the burden of very high computational complexity while learning the interaction of users’ and items’ latent features. In this work, we propose a novel kernel loss function for optimizing the objective function of matrix factorization in a non-linearly projected rating space under multiple contexts in an optimum manner and also incorporate the implicit feedback of items in the learning process. Further, the optimization is regularized by applying different weights for each regularization term depending on the users’ and items’ participation. Extensive experimental evaluation on five benchmark context-aware datasets indicates the superiority of the proposed work for capturing the non-linearity and predicting the ratings of unseen items for users under varying contexts over the existing and baseline methods. The proposed kernel loss function is also shown to be resistant against shilling attacks in the recommender system. A detailed ablation study demonstrates the validity of the proposed work and the results are shown to be statistically significantly better with RMSE improvement in the range of 3% to 11% over the baseline methods.