Adversarial tensor factorization for context-aware recommendation

Abstract

Contextual factors such as time, location, or tag, can affect user preferences for a particular item. Context-aware recommendations are thus critical to improve both quality and explainability of recommender systems, compared to traditional recommendations that are solely based on user-item interactions. Tensor factorization machines have achieved the state-of-the-art performance due to their capability of integrating users, items, and contextual factors in one unify way. However, few work has focused on the robustness of a context-aware recommender system. Improving the robustness of a tensor-based model is challenging due to the sparsity of the observed tensor and the multi-linear nature of tensor factorization. In this paper, we propose ATF, a model that combines tensor factorization and adversarial learning for context-aware recommendations. Doing so allows us to reap the benefits of tensor factorization, while enhancing the robustness of a recommender model, and thus improves its eventual performance. Empirical studies on two real-world datasets show that the proposed method outperforms standard tensor-based methods.