Modeling Product’s Visual and Functional Characteristics for Recommender Systems (Extended Abstract)

Recommender systems aim at helping users to discover interesting items and assisting business owners to obtain more profits. Nonetheless, traditional recommendations fail to explore the varying importance of product characteristics for different product domains. In light of this, we propose a novel probabilistic model for recommendation, which could learn products’ characteristics in a fine-grained manner. Specifically, a user’s preference for a given product is modeled as a combination of visual and functional aspects. To make our method practical in large-scale industrial scenarios, we devise a computationally efficient learning algorithm to optimize VFPMF’s parameters. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution, compared with several state-of-the-art methods.