1. Introduction

Given historical ratings $R_{ij} \in \mathbb{R}$ from a set of $m$ users to a set of $p$ items, collaborative filtering is a framework for inferring an unknown rating for a given user, item pair from the historical ratings. There are multiple types of collaborative filtering approaches, and these are covered by this excellent post.

The topic of this post is on the matrix factorization approach, which finds the factorization $R = UV^{\top}$ for the usually sparse ratings matrix $R \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times p}$, where $U \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times d}$ and $V \in \mathbb{R}^{p \times d}$ with $d « m$ and $d « p$. Assuming an user’s interests and an item’s popularity exist in a lower-dimensional manifold, the $i$-th row $u_{i} \in \mathbb{R}^{d}$ from $U$ represents interests for user $i$ and the $j$-th row $v_{j} \in \mathbb{R}^{d}$ from $V$ represents popularity for item $j$. From $U, V$, the predicted rating of user $i$ for item $j$ is the dot product $\hat{r}_{ij} = u_{i}^{\top}v_{j}$.

2. Method

For our derivation, we assume realistically that $R$ is sparse, where missingness can be denoted by the matrix $W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times p}$ where

\begin{align*} W_{ij}=\begin{cases} 1, & \text{if R_{ij} \neq \texttt{NaN}}\\ 0, & \text{Otherwise}\\ \end{cases} \end{align*}

The latent factors $U, V$ are learned by minimizing the following loss function

\begin{align*} \mathcal{L}(U, V, R) = \sum_{(i, j) \in S}(u_{i}^{\top}v_{j} - R_{ij})^{2} + \lambda \sum_{i = 1}^{m}||u_{i}||_{2}^{2} + \lambda \sum_{j = 1}^{p}||v_{j}||_{2}^{2}, \quad \text{where }S = \{(i, j): R_{ij} \neq \texttt{NaN}\}. \end{align*}

Unfortunately, since the $\mathcal{L}(U, V, R)$ is not jointly convex in $U, V$, we will need to employ alternating least squares to solve for $U$ and $V$. Alternating least squares solves for $U$ and $V$ in separate optimization steps holding the other set of latent factors constant. In this implementation, we will optimize the latent factor for one user and item at a time. Let $R_{u_{i}} \in \mathbb{R}^{p}$ be the item ratings from user $i$, $R_{v_{j}} \in \mathbb{R}^{m}$ be the ratings given to item $j$, $W_{u_{i}} = diag(W[i, :]) \in \mathbb{R}^{p \times p}$ be the diagonalized matrix of rating availability for user $i$, and $W_{v_{j}} = diag(W[:, j]) \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times m}$ is similarly defined as $W_{u_{i}}$ but for item $j$ instead. In matrix notation, the loss $\mathcal{L}$ for $u_{i}$ and $v_{j}$ are

$\mathcal{L}(R_{u_{i}}, u_{i}) = (R_{u_{i}} - Vu_{i})^{\top}W_{u_{i}}(R_{u_{i}} - Vu_{i}) + \lambda u_{i}^{\top}u_{i}$ $\mathcal{L}(R_{v_{j}}, v_{j}) = (R_{v_{j}} - Uv_{j})^{\top}W_{v_{j}}(R_{v_{j}} - Uv_{j}) + \lambda v_{j}^{\top}v_{j}.$

The closed form solution for $u_{i}$ is

\begin{align*} \frac{\partial \mathcal{L}(R_{u_{i}}, u_{i})}{\partial u_{i}} &= \frac{\partial}{\partial u_{i}}\left(R_{u_{i}}^{\top}W_{u_{i}}R_{u_{i}} - R_{u_{i}}^{\top}W_{u_{i}}Vu_{i} - u_{i}^{\top}V^{\top}W_{u_{i}}R_{u_{i}} + u_{i}^{\top}V^{\top}W_{u_{i}}Vu_{i} + \lambda u_{i}^{\top}u_{i}\right)\\ &= -2V^{\top}W_{u_{i}}R_{u_{i}} + 2V^{\top}W_{u_{i}}Vu_{i} + 2\lambda u_{i} = 0\\ &\Rightarrow u_{i}^{*} = (V^{\top}W_{u_{i}}V + \lambda I_{d})^{-1}V^{\top}W_{u_{i}}R_{u_{i}}. \end{align*}

By a similar derivation, the closed form solution for $v_{j}$ is

\begin{align*} v_{j}^{*} = (U^{\top}W_{v_{j}}U + \lambda I_{d})^{-1}U^{\top}W_{v_{j}}R_{v_{j}}. \end{align*}

3. Implementation

We will apply collaborative filtering to build a joke recommender system based on historical joke ratings of $m = 24,983$ users for $p = 100$ jokes. Here, the ratings $R_{ij} \in [-10, 10]$, with a higher value representing higher satisfaction. Load libraries and data.

from scipy import io
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
DIR = "datasets"



Preprocess the data. For training data, fill NaN with 0, and use 0 used to detect missingness in the implementation.

train = train.to_numpy()
train[np.isnan(train)] = 0
validation = np.array([list(map(int, line.strip().split(','))) for line in validation])


Set the regularization parameter $\lambda = 125$ and number of latent features to learn $d = 10$

lda = 125
d = 10


A few implementation details:

• We will continue alternating least squares until the mean squared error portion of $\mathcal{L}(U, V, R)$ converges.
• Initialize each entry of $U, V$ with values drawn from $\mathcal{N}(0, 1)$.
def collaborative_filtering(R, d, lda, threshold):
W = (R != 0).astype(np.float64)
L1 = float("inf")
# initialize user and joke latent factors
V = np.random.normal(0, 1, (R.shape[1], d))
U = np.random.normal(0, 1, (R.shape[0], d))
# S_idx is tuple - 1st array contain row indices and 2nd array contains column indices
S_idx = np.where(R != 0)
Rhat = U.dot(V.T)
L2 = np.mean((Rhat[S_idx] - R[S_idx])**2)
iteration = 1
while abs(L1 - L2) > threshold:
L1 = L2
# optimize U
for i, Wu in enumerate(W):
rating = R[i, :]
U[i, :] = np.linalg.inv(V.T.dot(np.diag(Wu)).dot(V) + lda * np.eye(d)).dot(V.T.dot(np.diag(Wu)).dot(rating)).flatten()
# optimize V
for j, Wv in enumerate(W.T):
rating = R[:, j]
V[j, :] = np.linalg.inv(U.T.dot(np.diag(Wv)).dot(U) + lda * np.eye(d)).dot(U.T.dot(np.diag(Wv)).dot(rating)).flatten()
Rhat = U.dot(V.T)
L2 = np.mean((Rhat[S_idx] - R[S_idx])**2)
print("Iteration {0}: Mean squared error is {1}".format(iteration, L2))
iteration += 1
return U, V


Train on historical data.

U, V = collaborative_filtering(train, d, lda, 0.1)

Iteration 1: Mean squared error is 18.325985391164423
Iteration 2: Mean squared error is 12.870451586077216
Iteration 3: Mean squared error is 12.091937379418232
Iteration 4: Mean squared error is 11.697168710065604
Iteration 5: Mean squared error is 11.4829143727792
Iteration 6: Mean squared error is 11.357592793000398
Iteration 7: Mean squared error is 11.27484206241288


The predicted ratings from learned latent factor matrices are $\hat{R} = UV^{\top}$. We can now use $u_{i}$ and $v_{j}$ to predict whether user $i$ will like joke $j$, with liking a joke given by $Y = \mathbb{1}(R_{ij} > 0)$.

The validation dataset has format

1, 5, 1
1, 8, 1


Where each line is of the format i, j, y, where $i$ is user index, $j$ is joke index, and $y$ is whether user $i$ liked joke $j$. The indices from the validation dataset start with 1.

Rhat = U.dot(V.T)


Convert ratings to whether to recommend joke to user.

Yhat = (Rhat > 0).astype(int)


Make prediction and calculate mean accuracy of recommendation.

row_idx = validation[:, 0] - 1
col_idx = validation[:, 1] - 1

accuracy = np.mean(Yhat[row_idx, col_idx] == validation[:, 2])
print("Accuracy is {0}".format(round(accuracy, 3)))

Accuracy is 0.72


This concludes the note.