Modeling Product’s Visual and Functional Characteristics for Recommender Systems

An effective recommender system can significantly help customers to find desired products and assist business owners to earn more income. Nevertheless, the decision-making process of users is highly complex, not only dependent on the personality and preference of a user, but also complicated by the characteristics of a specific product. For example, for products of different domains (e.g., clothing versus office products), the product aspects that affect a user’s decision are very different. As such, traditional collaborative filtering methods that model only user-item interaction data would deliver unsatisfactory recommendation results. In this work, we focus on fine-grained modeling of product characteristics to improve recommendation quality. Specifically, we first divide a product’s characteristics into visual and functional aspects—i.e., the visual appearance and functionality of the product. One insight is that, the visual characteristic is very important for products of visually-aware domain (e.g., clothing), while the functional characteristic plays a more crucial role for visually non-aware domain (e.g., office products). We then contribute a novel probabilistic model, named Visual and Functional Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (VFPMF), to unify the two factors to estimate user preferences on products. Nevertheless, such an expressive model poses efficiency challenge in parameter learning from implicit feedback. To address the technical challenge, we devise a computationally efficient learning algorithm based on alternating least squares. Furthermore, we provide an online updating procedure of the algorithm, shedding some light on how to adapt our method to real-world recommendation scenario where data continuously streams in. Extensive experiments on four real-word datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with both offline and online protocols.