Abstract
This aims to propose a collaborative filtering algorithm based on embedding representation and word embedding techniques, namely UI2vec. According to the joint feature extraction network designed in this paper, UI2vec embeds users and items on the potential space at the same time, and uses the item similarity between them to predict the user’s content of interest. Then a generative model VUI2vec with more stable performance is proposed based on UI2vec, which maps users and items as independent Gaussian distributions and obtains the approximate posterior distribution of both by variational inference. The recommendation performance of UI2vec and VUI2vec is evaluated on TaFeng, Movielens, and Netflix datasets. The impact of important superparameters within the model on performance is investigated. The experimental results show that compared with the baseline model, the proposed methods performs consistently well.
•UI2vec and VUI2vec as collaborative filtering-based recommendation systems.•It is based on embedding representation of users or items.•Performance is competitive with the state of the art on real-world datasets.•Results encourage integrating collaborative filtering with deep learning.