Abstract:
Social networks often provide group features to help users with similar interests associate and consume content together. Recommending groups to users poses challenges due to their complex relationship: user-group affinity is typically measured implicitly and varies with time; similarly, group characteristics change as users join and leave. To tackle these challenges, we adapt existing matrix factorization techniques to learn user-group affinity based on two different implicit engagement metrics: (i) which group-provided content users consume; and (ii) which content users provide to groups. To capture the temporally extended nature of group engagement we implement a time-varying factorization. We test the assertion that latent preferences for groups and users are sparse in investigating elastic-net regularization. Experiments using data from DeviantArt indicate that the time-varying implicit engagement-based model provides the best top-K group recommendations, illustrating the benefit of the added model complexity.
DOI:
10.1609/aaai.v30i1.10160