Linear vs. Non-Linear Embedding Methods in Recommendation Systems

Abstract

Predicting customer interest in items is very crucial in direct marketing as it can potentially boost sales. Data mining techniques are developed to predict which items a particular user might be interested in based on their purchase history or explicit feedback in form of ratings or comments. Recently, non-linear and linear methods have been developed for this purpose. In this study, we applied Neighborhood based Collaborative Filtering (CF), Matrix Factorization (MF), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Neural Graph CF (NGCF) and Light Graph Convolutional Network (LightGCN) on explicit user product rating data which is acquired from the online gaming and mobile entertainment platform called HADI. We compared the results of node embedding methods in terms of Precision@k, Recall@k and NDCG@k values. SVD and LightGCN showed the best test performance and SVD was significantly superior to LightGCN in terms of training speed. To further increase predictive performance of SVD, we have applied classification with Logistic Regression and Deep Random Forest on user and item embeddings created by the SVD.