Reliable TF-based recommender system for capturing complex correlations among contexts

Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) exploit multiple contexts to improve user experience in embracing new information and services. Tensor factorization (TF), a type of latent factor model, has achieved remarkable performance in CARS. TF learns latent representations of contexts by decomposing an observed rating tensor and combines the latent representations as a vector form to represent contextual influence on users and items. However, due to the limitation of the contextual expression power, they have difficulties in effectively capturing complex correlations among multiple contexts, and also the meaning of each context is diluted. To address the issue, we propose a reliable TF-based recommender system based on a proposed context tensor (CT-CARS), which incorporates a variety of correlations among contexts. CT-CARS contains a novel recommendation rating function and a learning algorithm. Specifically, the proposed context tensor elaborately captures the influences of both individual contexts and context combinations. Moreover, we introduce a novel parameter initialization based on past-learned results to improve the reliability of recommendations. The overall time complexity of our parameter learning algorithm grows linearly as dataset size increases. Experiments on six real-world datasets including two large-scaled datasets show that CT-CARS outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models in terms of both accuracy and reliability.