Privileged Matrix Factorization for Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering plays a crucial role in reducing excessive information in online consuming by suggesting products to customers that fulfil their potential interests. Observing that users’ reviews on their purchases are often in companion with ratings, recent works exploit the review texts in modelling user or item factors and have achieved prominent performance. Although effectiveness of reviews has been verified, one major defect of existing works is that reviews are used in justifying the learning of either user or item factors without noticing that each review associates a pair of user and item concurrently. To better explore the value of review comments, this paper presents the privileged matrix factorization method that utilize reviews in the learning of both user and item factors. By mapping review texts into the privileged feature space, a learned privileged function compensates the discrepancies between predicted ratings and groundtruth values rating-wisely. Thus by minimizing discrepancies and prediction errors, our method harnesses the information present in the review comments for the learning of both user and item factors. Experiments on five real datasets testify the effectiveness of the proposed method.