Sparse Linear Methods with Side Information for top-N recommendations

This paper focuses on developing effective algorithms that utilize side information for top-N recommender systems. A set of Sparse Linear Methods with Side information (SSLIM) is proposed, that utilize a regularized optimization process to learn a sparse item-to-item coefficient matrix based on historical user-item purchase profiles and side information associated with the items. This coefficient matrix is used within an item-based recommendation framework to generate a size-N ranked list of items for a user. Our experimental results demonstrate that SSLIM outperforms other methods in effectively utilizing side information and achieving performance improvement. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).