A Recommender System Based on Model Regularization Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network

A recommender system (RS) commonly adopts a High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix to describe user-item preferences. Collaborative Filtering (CF)-based models have been widely adopted to address such an HiDS matrix. However, a CF-based model is unable to learn the property distribution characteristic of user’s preference from an HiDS matrix, thereby its representation ability is limited. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Model Regularization Wasserstein GAN(MRWGAN) to extract the distribution of user’s preferences. Its main ideas are two-fold: a) adopting an auto-encoder to implement the generator model of GAN; b) proposing a model-regularized Wasserstein distance as an objective function to training a GAN model. Empirical studies on four HiDS matrices from industrial applications demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art models, the proposed model achieves higher prediction accuracy for missing data of an HiDS matrix.