Attention neural collaboration filtering based on GRU for recommender systems

Abstract

The collaborative filtering method is widely used in the traditional recommendation system. The collaborative filtering method based on matrix factorization treats the user’s preference for the item as a linear combination of the user and the item latent vectors, and cannot learn a deeper feature representation. In addition, the cold start and data sparsity remain major problems for collaborative filtering. To tackle these problems, some scholars have proposed to use deep neural network to extract text information, but did not consider the impact of long-distance dependent information and key information on their models. In this paper, we propose a neural collaborative filtering recommender method that integrates user and item auxiliary information. This method fully integrates user-item rating information, user assistance information and item text assistance information for feature extraction. First, Stacked Denoising Auto Encoder is used to extract user features, and Gated Recurrent Unit with auxiliary information is used to extract items’ latent vectors, respectively. The attention mechanism is used to learn key information when extracting text features. Second, the latent vectors learned by deep learning techniques are used in multi-layer nonlinear networks to learn more abstract and deeper feature representations to predict user preferences. According to the verification results on the MovieLens data set, the proposed model outperforms other traditional approaches and deep learning models making it state of the art.