Latent Group Recommendation based on Double Fuzzy Clustering and Matrix Tri-factorization

Group recommendation has received great attention owing to its practical value in real applications. However, group members are implicit and groups are formed occasionally in some scenarios. Existing solutions for latent group recommendation assumes a user belongs to a specific group, and totally ignore the possible correlation between the user'$s$ preferences and other groups' preferences. In addition, existing methods cannot deal with new items cold-start problem effectively because they only focus on which items are favored by the group without considering the hidden related information between items. These weaknesses usually lead to poor performance of latent group recommendation. To address the problems above, this paper proposes a latent group recommendation method based on double fuzzy clustering and matrix tri-factorization (DFCMTF -LGR). Firstly, this method utilizes unsupervised learning to implement potential feature extraction and double fuzzy clustering for users and items. Secondly, a novel matrix tri-factorization method is presented to adjust the membership of user-to-group, item-to-item category, and the incidence of group-to-item category is obtained. Finally, latent groups are detected according to user-to-group membership, and group rating can be generated in accordance with group-to-item category incidence matrix and item-to-item category membership. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that our proposed DFCMTF-LGR has better performance compared with state-of-the art methods.