Collaborative Topic Regression with Denoising AutoEncoder for Content and Community Co-Representation

Personalized recommendation of items frequently faces scenarios where we have sparse observations on users' adoption of items. In the literature, there are two promising directions. One is to connect sparse items through similarity in content. The other is to connect sparse users through similarity in social relations. We seek to integrate both types of information, in addition to the adoption information, within a single integrated model. Our proposed method models item content via a topic model, and user communities via an autoencoder model, while bridging a user's community-based preference to her topic-based preference. Experiments on public real-life data showcase the utility of the model, particularly when there is significant compatibility between communities and topics.