Scalable Linear Shallow Autoencoder for Collaborative Filtering

Recently, the RS research community has witnessed a surge in popularity for shallow autoencoder-based CF methods. Due to its straightforward implementation and high accuracy on item retrieval metrics, EASE is potentially the most prominent of these models. Despite its accuracy and simplicity, EASE cannot be employed in some real-world recommender system applications due to its inability to scale to huge interaction matrices. In this paper, we proposed ELSA, a scalable shallow autoencoder method for implicit feedback recommenders. ELSA is a scalable autoencoder in which the hidden layer is factorizable into a low-rank plus sparse structure, thereby drastically lowering memory consumption and computation time. We conducted a comprehensive offline experimental section that combined synthetic and several real-world datasets. We also validated our strategy in an online setting by comparing ELSA to baselines in a live recommender system using an A/B test. Experiments demonstrate that ELSA is scalable and has competitive performance. Finally, we demonstrate the explainability of ELSA by illustrating the recovered latent space.