A Hybrid Recommender System Based on Autoencoder and Latent Feature Analysis

Abstract

A recommender system (RS) is highly efficient in extracting valuable information from a deluge of big data. The key issue of implementing an RS lies in uncovering users’ latent preferences on different items. Latent Feature Analysis (LFA) and deep neural networks (DNNs) are two of the most popular and successful approaches to addressing this issue. However, both the LFA-based and the DNNs-based models have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. Consequently, relying solely on either the LFA or DNN-based models cannot ensure optimal recommendation performance across diverse real-world application scenarios. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel hybrid recommendation model that combines Autoencoder and LFA techniques, termed AutoLFA. The main idea of AutoLFA is two-fold: (1) It leverages an Autoencoder and an LFA model separately to construct two distinct recommendation models, each residing in a unique metric representation space with its own set of strengths; and (2) it integrates the Autoencoder and LFA model using a customized self-adaptive weighting strategy, thereby capitalizing on the merits of both approaches. To evaluate the proposed AutoLFA model, extensive experiments on five real recommendation datasets are conducted. The results demonstrate that AutoLFA achieves significantly better recommendation performance than the seven related state-of-the-art models.