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In this paper, we describe a method to tackle data sparsity and create recommendations in domains with limited knowledge about user preferences. We expand the variational autoencoder collaborative filtering from a single-domain to a multi-domain setting. The intuition is that user-item interactions in a source domain can augment the recommendation quality in a target domain. The intuition can be taken to its extreme, where, in a cross-domain setup, the user history in a source domain is enough to generate high-quality recommendations in a target one. We thus create a Product-of-Experts (POE) architecture for recommendations that jointly models user-item interactions across multiple domains. The method is resilient to missing data for one or more of the domains, which is a situation often found in real life. We present results on two widely-used datasets - Amazon and Yelp, which support the claim that holistic user preference knowledge leads to better recommendations. Surprisingly, we find that in some cases, a POE recommender that does not access the target domain user representation can surpass a strong VAE recommender baseline trained on the target domain.
Cédric Duchene, Nicolas Henchoz, Emily Clare Groves, Romain Simon Collaud, Andreas Sonderegger, Yoann Pierre Douillet
Pierre Dillenbourg, Richard Lee Davis, Kevin Gonyop Kim, Wei Jiang
Federico Alberto Alfredo Felici