[mlpack] Collaborative filtering - GSOC project idea

[Ryan Curtin]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 11:48:57AM +0530, Haritha Sreedharan Nair wrote:
> Hi,
> I am Haritha Sreedharan Nair (github username- haritha1313).
> I would like to work on implementing better collaborative filtering models
> in mlpack as part of GSOC. I had worked on recommendation system based
> projects earlier and I see a lot of scope in mlpack's CF implementation.
> 
> As of now I have been through the research paper cited in mlpack/methods/cf
> and realized that some concepts mentioned in the paper (the ones explaining
> how to handle biases etc.) haven't been implemented yet. I have also
> explored a few other research papers and articles including the one
> mentioned in mlpack's ideas wiki.
> 
> I found this (https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~xiangnan/papers/ncf.pdf) paper
> interesting - it gives importance to implicit feedback, performs better
> than existing methods and it is able to generalize the matrix factorization
> methods we use in mlpack too. Since it is a pretty new research paper I am
> not able to find any discussions on it and would like to know if the
> maintainers find it to be worth implementing.
> 
> I would also like to clarify a doubt. Is there any reason why quic_svd and
> randomized_svd have not been used for matrix factorization in CF?

Hi Haritha,

Thanks for the nice contributions over the past weeks.  The NCF paper
has definitely got some amount of attention over the past year and may
be worth implementing.  But if we do implement it, we should be sure to
compare it with existing techniques.

You are right that some of the concepts in the papers cited in the CF
code aren't implemented.  It might be nice to add these, but there is
not currently an open issue for it.

Lastly, there is not a good reason that QUIC-SVD and randomized SVD
haven't been used for CF.  If you would like to open a PR please feel
free. :)

I hope this is helpful; let me know if I can clarify anything.

Thanks!

Ryan

-- 
Ryan Curtin    | "How long have you had these things on?"
ryan at ratml.org | "Sixty-two years."