Latent Feature Modelling for Recommender Systems

Matrix factorization is one of the most successful model-based collaborative filtering approaches in recommender systems. Nevertheless, useful latent user features can lead to a more accurate recommendation. However, user privacy and cross-domains access restrictions challenge collection and analysis of such information. In this study, we propose a feature extraction method (WAFE) which leverages user-item interaction history to extract useful latent user features. We also propose a rating prediction approach that incorporates the local mean of users’ and items’ ratings. We evaluate our proposed model using two real-world benchmark datasets and compare its performance against the state-of-the-art matrix factorization collaborative filtering methods. Evaluation results show that proposed method outperforms the existing methods.