Gaussian Ranking by Matrix Factorization

The ranking quality at the top of the list is crucial in many real-world applications of recommender systems. In this paper, we present a novel framework that allows for pointwise as well as listwise training with respect to various ranking metrics. This is based on a training objective function where we assume that, for given a user, the recommender system predicts scores for all items that follow approximately a Gaussian distribution. We motivate this assumption from the properties of implicit feedback data. As a model, we use matrix factorization and extend it by non-linear activation functions, as customary in the literature of artificial neural networks. In particular, we use non-linear activation functions derived from our Gaussian assumption. Our preliminary experimental results show that this approach is competitive with state-of-the-art methods with respect to optimizing the Area under the ROC curve, while it is particularly effective in optimizing the head of the ranked list.