Weighted AutoEncoding recommender system

Recommender systems are information filtering tools that seek to match customers with products or services of interest. Most of the prevalent collaborative filtering recommender systems, such as matrix factorization and AutoRec, suffer from the "cold-start" problem, where they fail to provide meaningful recommendations for new users or new items due to informative-missing from the training data. To address this problem, we propose a weighted AutoEncoding model to leverage information from other users or items that share similar characteristics. The proposed method provides an effective strategy for borrowing strength from user or item-specific clustering structure as well as pairwise similarity in the training data, while achieving high computational efficiency and dimension reduction, and preserving nonlinear relationships between user preferences and item features. Simulation studies and applications to three real datasets show advantages in prediction accuracy of the proposed model compared to current state-of-the-art approaches.