Optimizing Factorization Machines for Top-N Context-Aware Recommendations

Context-aware Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques such as Factorization Machines (FM) have been proven to yield high precision for rating prediction. However, the goal of recommender systems is often referred to as a top-N item recommendation task, and item ranking is a better formulation for the recommendation problem. In this paper, we present two collaborative rankers, namely, Ranking Factorization Machines (RankingFM) and Lambda Factorization Machines (LambdaFM), which optimize the FM model for the item recommendation task. Specifically, instead of fitting the preference of individual items, we first propose a RankingFM algorithm that applies the cross-entropy loss function to the FM model to estimate the pairwise preference between individual item pairs. Second, by considering the ranking bias in the item recommendation task, we design two effective lambda-motivated learning schemes for RankingFM to optimize desired ranking metrics, referred to as LambdaFM. The two models we propose can work with any types of context, and are capable of estimating latent interactions between the context features under sparsity. Experimental results show its superiority over several state-of-the-art methods on three public CF datasets in terms of two standard ranking metrics.