Magnitude Bounded Matrix Factorisation for Recommender Systems

Low rank matrix factorisation is often used in recommender systems as a way of extracting latent features. When dealing with large and sparse datasets, traditional recommendation algorithms face the problem of acquiring large, unrestrained, fluctuating values over predictions. Imposing bounding constraints has been proven an effective solution. However, existing bounding algorithms can only deal with one pair of fixed bounds, and are very time-consuming when applied on large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named Magnitude Bounded Matrix Factorisation (MBMF), which allows different bounds for individual users/items and performs very quickly on large scale datasets. The key idea of our algorithm is to construct a model by constraining the magnitudes of each individual user/item feature vector. By converting coordinate system with radii set as the corresponding magnitudes, MBMF allows the above constrained optimisation problem to become an unconstrained one, which can be solved by unconstrained optimisation algorithms such as the stochastic gradient descent. We also explore an acceleration approach and the choice of magnitudes are given in detail as well. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that in most cases the proposed MBMF is superior over all existing algorithms in terms of accuracy and time complexity.