MOOCs video recommendation using low-rank and sparse matrix factorization with inter-entity relations and intra-entity affinity information

Purpose

The serious information overload problem of MOOCs videos decreases the learning efficiency of the students and the utilization rate of the videos. There are two problems worthy of attention for the matrix factorization (MF)-based video learning resource recommender systems. Those methods suffer from the sparsity problem of the user-item rating matrix, while side information about user and item is seldom used to guide the learning procedure of the MF.

Method

To address those two problems, we proposed a new MOOCs video resource recommender LSMFERLI based on Low-rank and Sparse Matrix Factorization (LSMF) with the guidance of the inter-Entity Relations and intra-entity Latent Information of the students and videos. Firstly, we construct the inter-entity relation matrices and intra-entity latent preference matrix for the students. Secondly, we construct the inter-entity relation matrices and intra-entity affinity matrix for the videos. Lastly, with the guidance of the inter-entity relation and intra-entity affinity matrices of the students and videos, the student-video rating matrix is factorized into a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix by the alternative iteration optimization scheme.

Conclusions

Experimental results on dataset MOOCcube indicate that LSMFERLI outperforms 7 state-of-the-art methods in terms of the HR@K and NDCG@K(K = 5,10,15) indicators increased by an average of 20.6 % and 21.0 %, respectively.