Research on product recommendation based on matrix factorization models fusing user reviews

Nowadays, recommendation models based on matrix factorization (MF) suffer from the problem of rating sparsity because user-product rating matrix is usually sparse. To address the problem, it is significant to fuse some contextual data or side information on basic MF models. According to this core idea, this paper proposes a modified recommendation model, MFFR (matrix factorization fusing reviews) which recommend products by considering the fusing information on user reviews and user ratings. First, MFFR constructs user-product preference matrix from user reviews by using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. Then MFFR predicts ratings and generates personalized top-n recommendation products by using MF model to learn comprehensive latent factors of user-product rating matrix and user-product preference matrix simultaneously. The experimental results of three published datasets demonstrate that our model MFFR can achieve more accurate predicted ratings and hits more correct products of top-n recommendation than the comparative traditional models. MFFR can effectively raise the quality of recommendation, especially in the high level of rating sparsity.