Negative Binomial Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems

01/05/2018

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by   Olivier Gouvert, et al.

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We introduce negative binomial matrix factorization (NBMF), a matrix factorization technique specially designed for analyzing over-dispersed count data. It can be viewed as an extension of Poisson matrix factorization (PF) perturbed by a multiplicative term which models exposure. This term brings a degree of freedom for controlling the dispersion, making NBMF more robust to outliers. We show that NBMF allows to skip traditional pre-processing stages, such as binarization, which lead to loss of information. Two estimation approaches are presented: maximum likelihood and variational Bayes inference. We test our model with a recommendation task and show its ability to predict user tastes with better precision than PF.