Modeling users' dynamic preference for personalized recommendation

Modeling the evolution of users' preference over time is essential for personalized recommendation. Traditional time-aware models like (1) time-window or recency based approaches ignore or deemphasize much potentially useful information, and (2) time-aware collaborative filtering (CF) approaches largely rely on the information of other users, thus failing to precisely and comprehensively profile individual users for personalization. In this paper, for implicit feedback data, we propose a personalized recommendation model to capture users' dynamic preference using Gaussian process. We first apply topic modeling to represent a user's temporal preference in an interaction as a topic distribution. By aggregating such topic distributions of the user's past interactions, we build her profile, where we treat each topic's values at different interactions as a time series. Gaussian process is then applied to predict the user's preference in the next interactions for top-N recommendation. Experiments conducted over two real datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation models by at least 42:46% and 66:14% in terms of precision and Mean Reciprocal Rank respectively.