Providing reliability in Recommender Systems through Bernoulli Matrix Factorization
This addresses the need for reliability in recommender systems, particularly in collaborative filtering, though it is an incremental improvement over existing matrix factorization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of providing reliability estimates alongside predictions in recommender systems by proposing Bernoulli Matrix Factorization (BeMF), which improves recommendation quality by selecting the most reliable predictions, as shown by outperforming baseline methods in state-of-the-art reliability measures.
Beyond accuracy, quality measures are gaining importance in modern recommender systems, with reliability being one of the most important indicators in the context of collaborative filtering. This paper proposes Bernoulli Matrix Factorization (BeMF), which is a matrix factorization model, to provide both prediction values and reliability values. BeMF is a very innovative approach from several perspectives: a) it acts on model-based collaborative filtering rather than on memory-based filtering, b) it does not use external methods or extended architectures, such as existing solutions, to provide reliability, c) it is based on a classification-based model instead of traditional regression-based models, and d) matrix factorization formalism is supported by the Bernoulli distribution to exploit the binary nature of the designed classification model. The experimental results show that the more reliable a prediction is, the less liable it is to be wrong: recommendation quality improves after the most reliable predictions are selected. State-of-the-art quality measures for reliability have been tested, which shows that BeMF outperforms previous baseline methods and models.