Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Applied Soft Computing Journal

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/asoc

Rating prediction for recommendation: Constructing user profiles and

item characteristics using backpropagation
∗
Bishwajit Purkaystha , Tapos Datta, Md. Saiful Islam, Marium-E-Jannat
Computer Science and Engineering, Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Sylhet-3114, Bangladesh

highlights

• Distinctive user and item factors are constructed solely based on rating triples.
• A deep feedforward method is used to model the complex relationship between factors.
• No contextual or demographic information are used, instead, they are learned.
• The system has been evaluated for rating predictions on three real world datasets.
• The proposed method produces comparable predictions with some best existing methods.

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Recommender systems play an important role in quickly identifying and recommending most acceptable
Received 13 December 2017 products to the users. The latent user factors and item characteristics determine the degree of user
Received in revised form 8 October 2018 satisfaction on an item. While many of the methods in the literature have assumed that these factors
Accepted 9 November 2018
are linear, there are some other methods that treat these factors as nonlinear; but they do it in a more
Available online 16 November 2018
implicit way. In this paper, we have investigated the effect of true nature (i.e., nonlinearity) of the user
Keywords: factors and item characteristics, and their complex layered relationship on rating prediction. We propose
Recommender system a new deep feedforward network that learns both the factors and their complex relationship concurrently.
Neural networks The aim of our study was to automate the construction of user profiles and item characteristics without
Nonlinear factorization using any demographic information and then use these constructed features to predict the degree of
Matrix factorization
acceptability of an item to a user. We constructed the user and item factors by using separate learner
Backpropagation
weights at the lower layers, and modeled their complex relationship in the upper layers. The construction
of the user profiles and the item characteristics, solely based on rating triples (i.e., user id, item id,
rating), overcomes the requirement of explicit demographic information be given to the system. We have
tested our model on three real world datasets: Jester, Movielens, and Yahoo music. Our model produces
better rating predictions than some of the state-of-the-art methods which use demographic information.
The root mean squared error incurred by our model on these datasets are 4.0873, 0.8110, and 0.9408
respectively. The errors are smaller than current best existing models’ errors in these datasets. The results
show that our system can be integrated to any web store where development of hand engineered features
for recommending products is less feasible due to huge traffics and also that there is a lack of demographic
information about the users and the items.
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction impinges on user experiences as well as on the number of e-

The enormity of information across the web has made it ex-
tremely difficult for its users to quickly find the most acceptable
products. Looking and searching for desired products across the
web stores is both time consuming and tedious; it significantly
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: iambishwa@student.sust.edu (B. Purkaystha),
taposdatta2013@gmail.com (T. Datta), saiful-cse@sust.edu (Md.S. Islam),
jannat-cse@sust.edu (Marium-E-Jannat).
commerce transactions. The user experiences and the number of
transactions can be improved if a right product can be recom-
mended to an appropriate user. As for the gigantism of both the
number of users and the number of items, it is almost impossible to
manually pick a product and recommend it to a correct user. There-
fore, a mechanical recommendation system might significantly
improve the user experiences and the number of transactions by
recommending a right product to a correct customer.
Over a period of two decades researchers have worked ex-
tensively to address this problem [1–3]. Before a product can be
recommended to a user, the interaction between the user and the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2018.11.018
1568-4946/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322
Fig. 1. A sample rating matrix. There is a total of m users and n items. Each row
provides the personalization for the users, while each column provides the same
for the items. The binary value (although real value in practical cases) in the cell ci,j
(i ≤ m; j ≤ n) shows the rating given by user i on item j. The missing values are the
ones that a recommender system seeks to fill in.
item must be inferred directly or indirectly. Most of the methods in
the literature have tried to interpolate the user preferences and the
item characteristics to produce a prediction on their interaction [4].
The existing methods are mostly based on the assumption that
the users who have demonstrated similar preferences in past are
likely to have similar opinions on a new product [5]. While this
assumption is partially correct, it requires improvements in terms
of the subtleties in user preferences and in item characteristics
both. This assumption eclipses the nuances of individuality of both
users and items. It is likely that capturing these little dissimilarities
in users and products may lead to better predictions. Moreover,
this assumption harbors to necessitate a lot of ratings to find a
similar set of users. Another discrepancy is that most of these
methods take a linear combination of these factors to predict the
interaction which does not reflect the real world scenario. In this
paper, we treat the preferences of each user and characteristics
of each item as discriminative learnable nonlinear factors, and
take a nonlinear combination of these factors to interpolate the
interaction between a user and an item. Our study is important for
a number of reasons. The first reason is that we treat the actors
(i.e., the users and the items in the dataset) in a more granular
way. We do not impose the aforementioned statistical assumption
to our system, rather, it is up to the model itself, that, how it
models each user and each item; we do not force it to find a set
of similar users or a set of similar items. The second reason is that
we construct distinctive features without using any demographic
information. This is important where demographic information
about the actors are not available or the number of actors is so
huge that manual tagging is almost impossible. The third reason
is that we treat the factors in its true nature, i.e., we treat them
as nonlinear entities. This should enable our system to model the
interaction between the factors better, and consequently, produce
better rating predictions.
The interaction between any user and any item can be modeled
as a rating matrix Rm×n , for m users and n items, whose most
of the entries are empty (see Fig. 1). The entries that contain
numeric value are the known interactions for those users and those
items. The advantage of modeling the problem as a rating matrix
is that the algebraic techniques [6,7] or other factorization frame-
works [8] can easily be applied to it. The matrix representation
is preferable wherever the distinctive user and item factors are
involved. It is assumed that the numbers of factors for each user
are the same, and so are the numbers of factors for each item.
There have been many approaches to fill in the missing values.
Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most approached framework in
completing rating matrices [9–12]. The framework assumes that
similar users will have similar interactions with the same item.
311
Good et al. [10] used information filtering (IF) to analyze the item
content and to build user profiles. After building each user profile
they identified similar user groups and their opinions. Finally,
the opinions and item content analyses were combined to make
a recommendation to an appropriate set of the users. A slightly
different framework, known as content-based filtering (CBF), ex-
ploits the similarity in items and recommends the similar items
that a user has shown preference on [13–15]. Sarwar et al. in [14]
evaluated different item-based filtering techniques. They showed a
comparative performance analysis of two similarity metrics: pear-
son correlation coefficient (PCC), a statistical correlation measuring
technique, and cosine similarity metric. One severe drawback of
both PCC and cosine similarity is that they are extremely sensitive
to outliers. Therefore, in larger datasets where a significant number
of outliers are present, the prediction would tend to degrade. Sim-
ilar sets of users can also be found by other clustering techniques
such as K-means clustering [16]. But segmentation quality of the
users in such techniques largely depends on how the considered
factors are initialized. A clustering technique might have to do a
huge amount of computation before it can form reasonable groups
if the number of ratings is significantly large. A modern recom-
mender system needs to be robust in the larger domains. Both CBF
and CF face sparsity and scalability problems. Sparsity problem
arises where there is a huge number of users and items, but the
number of ratings is significantly low. These issues can make any
interactive recommender system impractical, and therefore, these
frameworks are not adopted alone.
Memory based techniques such as association rule mining [17],
or decision trees [18] have been mixed with these frameworks.
In [17] the authors used apriori algorithm, a collaborative filtering
data mining technique, and retrieved similar users and product
association rules. A product rule is generated by transaction in-
formation from each similarity group. These rules were then used
for user specific services. The authors in [18] used external infor-
mation (i.e., web usage data from clickstream) along with the pur-
chasing records of customers to learn user preferences and product
association. They also introduced product taxonomy, a background
information about the products (such as what range a product’s
price had fallen in), in their recommendation process. Although
these methods did not calculate the user or item factors explicitly,
by considering similar users or items they were implicitly working
with the factors.
Although most of the researches on the literature has addressed
the problem as a supervised learning problem, there have been
some researches which have approached to it as an unsupervised
learning problem [19]. For example, Kim et al. [20] evaluated
performances of several clustering techniques (such as simple K-
means, self organizing map (SOM), and K-means with genetic
algorithm) in online shopping domain. GA was used as an initializer
in K-means clustering, and the results showed this model signif-
icantly outperformed the other two models in segmenting users
so that better recommendations could be made. Unsupervised
learning has been applied to movie recommendation also [21]. The
authors used SOM with collaborative filtering; they built clusters
by segmenting the users with respect to demographic information.
The other information they used for clustering is user preferences
for items which they had interpolated using SOM. These unsu-
pervised techniques had the primary job to build similar sets (of
users and items), but they did not construct any features of the
actors; this was the reason they required demographic information
available or a user needed to produce a significant amount of
ratings on items to find its appropriate set (of similar users).
Matrix Factorization techniques, on the other hand, directly
involve with the latent user and item factors. Say, the factors F u are
known for any user u and factors F i are known for any item i. The
missing rating r̂u,i can be calculated by using a dot multiplication
in Eq. (1).
312 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322
r̂u,i = F u · F i
Alternating least squares (ALS) [7] or Singular value decompo-
sition (SVD) [22–25] can be used to find a lower rank of the rating
matrix keeping the original entries fixed, and thus ensuring that
the filled in entries are best conforming with the initial conditions.
The authors in [22] tried to mitigate the effects of scalability and
sparsity problem of the recommender systems. They confronted
scalability problem by dimensionality reduction (using SVD to find
most suitable items or users in related clusters). Zhou et al. in [25]
introduced an incremental algorithm on top of SVD to produce a
better prediction accuracy and also showed that their system run
for a slightly less amount of time. Koren [6] introduced a better
version of SVD, SVD++, which can capture dynamic factors. These
factorization techniques require that the number of latent user
factors and the number of latent item factors to be the same. This
imposition may be ideal but less practical. Taking such a linear
combination (as in Eq. (1)) is a straightforward thing to do, but
it does not reflect the real world scenario. The obligation that a
factor Fu,j for user u can only intermingle with a factor Fi,j for
item i to contribute in prediction constricts potential inter-factor
relations. This implies that a nonlinear combination of the user
and item factors should be a better approximator than these linear
techniques.
On the other hand, the neural networks have been very suc-
cessful in modeling complex nonlinear relationship in various do-
mains [26,27]. They had been applied in recommender system
literature also and showed promise as Salakhutdinov et al. [28]
used restricted boltzmann network (RBM), a special kind of neural
network, to improve Netflix’s own rating prediction accuracy by
more than 6%. Although the networks can be used with a CF [21]
or a CBF framework [29], they can be used independently too.
They are not constrained by the similarity metrics, and are able
to treat each individual user and item separately on the merit
of characteristics. It is possible to have any number of units at
the input layer of a network; thus, it removes the obligation of
traditional linear algebraic techniques that the number of user
factors and the number of item factors must be the same (see
Section 2.1). The modern recommender system has to deal with
users who come from all walks of life and culture. The items are
also very different. So it is fairly obvious that a complex, layered,
and nonlinear relationship exists between the users and items.
Recently their use in large datasets has been very success-
ful [30–33]. These deep factor models can even learn to exploit
audio features in a music file to recommend it to a user [29,34].
Although these deep models can capture the nonlinear relationship
in user and item factors, they require that these factors to be given
to them. They require demographic information, e.g., they need
audio features to recommend a music to a user. The popular neural
network architectures like convolutional neural networks have
also turned out to be successful in movie rating prediction [35].
The authors generated latent factors by convolutional matrix fac-
torization using contextual information. They detected distinctive
features in convolutional layers as opposed to our motivation
where we are interested in constructing useful features rather than
using any contextual information.
The degree of satisfaction of a user on an item is directly de-
pendent on a set of user factors and item factors. Therefore, the
more precise the factors can be interpolated, the more accurate the
predictions can be generated. The motivation behind our research
was to find answers to a few questions.
• Is it possible to construct the user profiles and the item
characteristics reasonably well based only on rating triples
(i.e., without using any demographic information)?
• Will rating predictions be more accurate if nuances in user
(1) behaviors and in item characteristics are emphasized as op-
posed to the statistical assumption that the similar users will
have similar interactions with the same items?
• How much better ratings would a method predict if it treats
the factors as nonlinear than the methods which consider
them linear?
Our finding based on this work is that for a large number of
rating triples (e.g., Movielens 1 million dataset [36]) this useful set
of factors can be interpolated to the degree that it outperforms
the systems which use explicit factors. It turns out that a deep
factorizing model can be very effective in constructing (or learning)
distinctive set of features of both users and items just based on
the rating triples. These learned features, in turn, can be further
processed to produce a rating. The research questions are further
discussed in Section 3.5 and in Section 3.6.
Although there are a lot of neural network architectures in
the literature (like the recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convo-
lutional neural networks (CNNs), restricted boltzmann machines
(RBMs), etc.), we have picked the feedforward neural network
for a number of reasons. All the former architectures seek to
model the relation in regard to the data given to them. But, our
approach to the problem was different; as we had not used any
external information other than the rating triples, we were ought
to make some random spurious factors (in consistent with the
rating triples) as a pluggable data to our network. These factors
were then updated regularly after each iteration in training period.
Normally, the RNNs are useful for the sequence learning problems,
but here we were not dealing with sequences. The CNNs model
the relationship by using replicative feature detectors which is in
contrast to our motivation as we were constructing the features
themselves. Therefore, these special neural network architectures
are useful in learning sequences, or detecting features in the data.
We did not have any fixed data and we were neither learning se-
quences nor detecting features. As we had the objective to model a
complex nonlinear layered relationship in the ratings and a simple
feedforward neural network is able to approximate any nonlinear
function [37], we opted for a simpler neural network architecture.
The central idea of our deep feedforward model is not to use
any external information other than the rating triples. Learning is,
therefore, to achieve two specializations. The first specialization is
to infer the factors of each user and each item that are assumed to
be determinants for the visible ratings (and the missing ratings).
The second specialization is learning how to work with these
factors. This specialization is achieved in two logical stages; the
first stage is done by learning how to deal with user factors and
item factors separately (i.e., detecting already learned user and
item factors) by using separate learner connections, and once we
learn how to capture the factors separately, the second stage is
done by flowing these learned factors through several layers of
nonlinear units of the network. All these learnings take place at
the same time.
The separate learning helps in factorization. As we did not use
any demographic information and were only left with the rating
triples, we had to start with some bipartite factors (each brought
from a uniform distribution) —one group represented user factors
while the other represented item factors. Connecting a partisan
factor to an upper layer unit exclusively (i.e., that upper layer unit
would not connect to the other group at the lower layer) made it
possible to receive an error gradient solely for that partisan factor.
Had there was no separate connections, the error gradient received
for a group would have been incorrect as the other group had a
contribution in the error. The analysis is elaborated in Sections
2.2.3 and 2.2.4.
We are mainly interested with factorizing users and items, and
their relationship. We have not considered the cold start problem,
 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322 313

a very common problem arises when a new user or a new item is

introduced. Our assumption and the architecture does not allow
us to emphasize on it. To deal with the cold start problem prac-
tically, the prior information about the product must be known,
but this is a complete antithesis to our motivation. We emphasize
on constructing distinctive features of users and items, and it is
impossible to construct the features of a user or an item if the
system has not seen it previously. If there is no rating available for a
user or an item, its factors, brought from the uniform distribution,
are not updated at all. Thus it is not possible to predict the behavior
of a user or the characteristic of an item, if it was not involved
in any rating. For all we have not dealt the cold start explicitly,
if the system encounters an item that has not been rated before,
the interaction does not have to be totally random. Say, the system
finds an item which has not been rated before. Let us further
assume that the network has seen much data, and its weights have
the settings for which currently it is in a local minimum or close to a
local minimum. The learned user factors, understanding of how to
deal with the factors, and the modeling of the relationship between
factors counter balances the cold start problem to some extent. The
process is less compact, and this indirect mitigation does not work
very well in practice.
Although for new users or items the system does not work
satisfactorily, our work makes several contributions.

• Firstly, this nonlinear factorization method overcomes the

barrier of other linear factor methods (like SVD++ [6]) in
terms of linear modeling of relationship. The methods which
do straightforward dot multiplication between user factors
and item factors require that the number of the user factors
and the number of item factors to be the same. Our model
does not constrict any such. The variance in user factors and
the variance in item factors maybe comparable for a balanced
dataset which has similar number of users and items. But,
for any dataset, which has a significant disproportion in the
number of users and items [11], the variances are incompa-
rable. Thus, the imposition that the number of user factors
and the number of item factors be the same is not ideal. Our
deep factorization model allows the number of user factors
and the number of item factors be different. In fact, it is almost
every time the case that the optimal results are found when
the number of user factors and the number of item factors are
not the same (see Section 3.4).
• Secondly, the user and item factors are constructed auto-
matically to make predictions. This automatic learning is
especially desired for the scenarios where no information is
available other than the rating triples. We also show how our
model captures each user profile and each item characteristic
with two examples in Section 3.5.
• We finally measure the effectiveness of the variant models
based on our proposed method by using datasets from three
different domains under various conditions. We also provide
the extensive comparative analyses of our models with some
of the state-of-the-art models.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes
our methodology with a detailed analysis and ends with an ana-
lytical justification for how the separate learning works. Section
3 describes the findings of our experiments, discusses the quality
of the ratings predicted by our model, evaluates the performance
of our proposed method, provide with a comparative analysis with
other best existing methods, and finally ends with an empirical jus-
tification of the separate learning. In Section 4 we summarize our
findings and contributions, and very briefly discuss the potential
future investigations.
Fig. 2. The full network architecture. This network differs from the traditional
fully connected feedforward neural networks in a view that the bottommost two
layers of the network are not fully connected. Another exception is that the units
of the input layer (representing the factors) are also updated to facilitate factor
construction.
2. Methodology: Nonlinear User and Item Factorization (NUIF)
NUIF model learns the user and item factors, and their com-
plex nonlinear relationship simultaneously using backpropaga-
tion. The model employs a deep feedforward neural network which
forward-propagates the factors to produce a real-valued output.
The error in the output layer is then backward-propagated until
the factor layer is reached. The factors in this layer are then updated
accordingly.
2.1. The network architecture
The network architecture is shown in Fig. 2. This is a traditional
feedforward network but with an exception. The exception is in
our connection from the bottommost layer (l(1) ) to the first hidden
layer (l(2) ). Layer l(1) is actually a container of the user factors (Fu )
and item factors (Fi ). It can be thought that it is logically divided
into two sublayers, say sublayer l(1,u) and sublayer l(1,i) . The units
at l(1,u) always contain the Fu exclusively, whereas, the units at
the l(1,i) always contain Fi . The number of user factors (i.e., the
number of units at l(1,u) ) and the number of item factors (i.e., the
number of units at l(1,i) ) vary across data domains and require
empirical settings (which is discussed in Section 3.4). Similarly, we
have logically divided the first hidden layer, l(2) into two, sublayer
l(2,1) and sublayer l(2,2) . We have not wired any connection from
layer l(1,u) to layer l(2,2) . Similarly, no unit at l(1,i) (i.e., Fi ) has any
connection to the units at layer l(2,1) . On the other hand, the units
at the layer l(1,u) are fully connected to the units at layer l(2,1) and
the units at the layer l(1,i) are connected to all the units at layer l(2,2) .
Let W (l) , (l > 1), be the weights (i.e., connections) from the layer
l − 1 to the layer l. So, W (2) is logically divided into W (2,1) and W (2,2) .
Obviously, W (2,1) denotes all the connections from the layer l(1,u) to
the layer l(2,1) while W (2,2) denotes the connections from the layer
l(1,i) to the layer l(2,2) .
314 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322

Each unit at layer l (l > 2) is connected to all the units at layer 2.2.2. Learning process of the network: δ -rule
l − 1, i.e., immediate layers are fully connected. At the final layer, Our network learns by back-propagating the errors using δ -
we have set only one unit; when the factors from the input layer rule. Say, our network produced ratings y while the actual ratings
are propagated forward through upper layers and the transformed were given t. Let there be N training examples in the batch, and
information relayed to this unit, it produces a real value which therefore, we calculated the sum of squared errors (SSE) (Eq. (11))
is the rating. The units at each layer (except for the input layer) and back-propagated it.
are nonlinear units and there are actually two kinds of nonlinear
units we have used (but not both at the same time). If the dataset N
contains negative ratings then our units should be able to produce 1 ∑ (i)
E= (y − t (i) )2 (11)
negative values and in that case we would opt for tanh(·) activation 2
i=1
units (Eq. (2)). However, if there is no negative rating involved we
The error gradient with respect to the output was calculated using
would opt for logistic units σ (·) (Eq. (3)). In both the equations z is
Eq. (12).
the input to the units.
ez − e−z ∂E
tanh(z) = (2) =y−t (12)
ez + e−z ∂y
1 The error due to the output unit was calculated as such:
σ (z) = (3) ∂E ∂E ∂y ∂E
1 + e−z δ (L) = = · = ⊙ σ ′ (z (L) ) (13)
∂ z (L) ∂ y ∂ z (L) ∂y
2.2. Network analysis
The error in the immediate layers were calculated as:
2.2.1. Forward pass
δ (l) = (δ (l+1) · W (l+1) ) ⊙ σ ′ (z (l) ) (14)
Before training could be started, we had to identify each user
and each item in the dataset uniquely. After identifying them we σ (·) is the derivative of the activation function. For the logis-
′
initialized factor vector for each user and each item randomly. Say, tic units, σ ′ (z (l) ) = σ (z (l) )(1 − σ (z (l) )), and for the tanh units,
we decided to have Nu factors for each user and Ni factors for each tanh′ (z (l) ) = (1 − (tanh(z (l) ))2 ). The error gradients for each weight
item. The user factor vectors were initialized with the uniform and each bias were calculated using Eqs. (15) and (16) respectively.
random values in range [Umin , Umax ] (see Eq. (4)) and similarly item
factor vectors were initialized in range [Imin , Imax ] (see Eq. (5)) [38]. ∂E
= a(l−1) · δ (l) (15)
√ √ ∂ W (l)
6 6 ∂E
Umin = − Umax = (4) = δ (l) (16)
Nu Nu ∂ b(l)
√ √ We updated the weights using Eq. (17) and biases using Eq. (18)
6 6 at each epoch. This is a straightforward gradient descent update
Imin = − Imax = (5) where η is the learning rate.
Ni Ni
After initializing the factor vectors randomly, we had to feed ∂E
W (l) ←− W (l) − η (17)
them to the network. The user factor vectors (Fu ) for each mini- ∂ W (l)
batch were clung to the first sublayer of the bottommost layer ∂E
(i.e., l(1,u) ). The item factor vectors (Fi ) for each mini-batch, sim- b(l) ←− b(l) − η (l) (18)
∂b
ilarly, were clung to second sublayer of the bottommost layer
Our network learns two different things concurrently because
(i.e., l(1,i) ).
of the wiring that we chose. At the output layer where there is only
z (2,1) = W (2,1) · Fu + b(2,1) z (2,2) = W (2,2) · Fi + b(2,2) one unit which receives layered, complex nonlinear information
(6) about the factors from the units situated at the layer just below.
Here b(2,1) and b(2,2) are the biases for the first hidden layer and Thus whenever the weights between layer L − 1 and layer L get
z (2,1) and z (2,2) are the weighted input to the first sublayer and the updated according to the error gradient, this causes our network to
second sublayer of the first hidden layer respectively. The output be better at processing already L − 1 layered interaction (between
of the first hidden layer is given by applying either tanh(·) or σ (·) factors) to make it L layered interaction. This generalizes to the
to z (2) . other layers l (l > 2) as well.
a(2) = activation(z (2) ) (7)
For subsequent discussion it would be assumed that the activa- 2.2.3. Specialization with the separate learners
tion function is actually the σ (·) function (Eq. (3)). So, Eq. (7) can As the training progresses the weights at the first hidden layer
be rewritten as Eq. (8). are forced to update themselves to minimize their contribution
in the error (in Eq. (11)). When they update themselves (using
a(2) = σ (z (2) ) (8)
gradient descent optimizer) this causes the current configuration
Similarly, the output of each layer can be calculated by first taking going down towards a ravine in the error surface (see Fig. 3).
the weighted input from the immediate lower layer and then At the ravine, the parameters (including the weights of the first
applying the activation function to it (Eq. (9)). hidden layer) have values that are locally optimized. Under these
circumstances, if we change the values of weights at first hidden
layer the position of the current configuration would go upwards
z (l) = W (l) · a(l−1) + b(l)
the error surface (and the learning will obviously constrict the
a(l) = σ (z (l) ) (9) change). So, in other words, the current configuration contains one
The output unit o, at the final layer, produces one real-valued of the best set of values for the weights at the first hidden layer.
output (i.e., rating). The error gradients incurred by the first sublayer of the first
hidden layer (i.e., l(2,1) ) are only due to the user container (i.e., l(1,u) )
outputo = σ (W L · a(L−1) + b(L) ) (10) (as there was no connection from the item container). The units
 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322
Fig. 3. The same error surface is shown to have two local minima A and B in both left and right. The configuration (filled in circle) on the left has the tendency to go down
in the hill because of the optimizer with current settings of the parameters (i.e., biases and weights). In the right, the network tends to stay at the ravine A because this is
locally optimized.
at this sublayer had processed the user information only and for-
warded it to the next layer. So reducing the error by updating
the weights at this sublayer directly amounts to specialization in
dealing with the user factors. These weights do not recognize the
item factors but they specialize in dealing with user factors only.
They discriminatingly learn the user factors only. Similarly, the
weights of the second sublayer (i.e., W (2,2) ) specialize in dealing
with item factors alone.
2.2.4. Learning the user and item factors
The error gradients are further propagated from the first sub-
layer of the first hidden layer to the user container (and this is
unlike to what is done in the traditional neural networks; the
inputs are not updated in them, but in our case they are not the real
inputs, rather, spurious ones brought from a uniform distribution).
The user factor vectors were clung to the units of this container.
The error incurred by the first sublayer of first hidden layer are only
due to the factors of this container, and therefore, any subsequent
update to these factor vectors would give the network better fit to
data. This part of training amounts to learning the preferences of
each user separately.
Similarly, the item factor vectors in a mini-batch were clung to
the units of the second sublayer of the bottommost layer (i.e., l(1,i) ).
The error gradients received through the second sublayer of the
first hidden layer (l(2,2) ) are the corrections to random initialization
of the item factors. Hence, the subsequent updates also cause the
model to learn each item factor individually.
3. Experimental Results and Discussion
3.1. Datasets
We have tested our model on real world datasets [11,36]. The
datasets are summarized in Table 1. As it can be seen that they
constitute ratings of movies, jokes, and music. The datasets contain
different rating ranges and sparsity levels. There are different sizes
of the data in the same domains. The collection periods of the
ratings show that these datasets would test the system’s ability to
model dynamic behaviors of both users and items. For example,
the ratings of Movielens 100k were collected in span of more than
20 years. The four datasets (i.e., Movielens and Yahoo datasets)
have ratings which are categorical whereas the other two datasets
(i.e., Jester datasets) have ratings which are continuous. But in our
work we have produced continuous ratings for each dataset.
Jester datasets do not contain any demographic information
about the users, but the jokes on which the ratings have been
produced are available. Each user in Jester datasets has rated at
least 15 jokes. Both of the Movielens datasets contain demographic
information (such as the age, sex, occupation, etc.) about the users.
They also contain information (e.g., genre, imdb url, release date,
movie title, etc.) about the movies. Although, these information
315
are available, we did not use them in our system. In both of these
datasets each user has rated at least 20 movies. For Yahoo music
datasets, each of the user has rated at least 10 musics.
As all the users in all the datasets are chosen based on the
number of ratings they have produced, they are all bound to be the
successful users (i.e., the users who did not enjoy rating movies or
simply did not participate in the ratings were omitted) [36]. Any
system that would learn from these ratings will be fundamentally
unknown of the behaviors of such users. Another limitation is that,
as collecting the ratings spanned for several years, recommenda-
tion algorithms, user interfaces, and available facilities changed
from time to time. This might have impinged on users’ way of
rating movies, jokes, or musics.
3.2. Evaluation metrics
3.2.1. RMSE
We have measured the accuracy of the model in terms of root
mean squared error (RMSE) as it is very common in the literature.
Let there be N samples in the test set. Say, our network produced
rating y(i) for sample i (1 ≤ i ≤ N) while the actual rating was t (i) .
Then, Eq. (19) gives the RMSE incurred by our model.
√
∑N (i)
i=1 (y − t (i) )2
RMSE = (19)
N
3.2.2. Precision and recall
We have used these two accuracy metrics for comparison
among models. Let there be a threshold θ applied on a subset
of rating triples R. For all the ratings ru,i ∈ R, we say the item
i is relevant to the user u if and only if ru,i ≥ θ . Say, w is the
number of items retrieved by the model as relevant items whereas
only x of them were actually relevant. Precision is, then, calculated
by Eq. (20).
x
precision = (20)
w
Recall is simply the ratio of the number of relevant items retrieved
to the number of actual relevant items which were present in the
inventory. As, for any user, there are only two categories (i.e., either
to be recommended or to be not recommended) for each product,
the recall is the same as the sensitivity. If there are originally z
relevant items after the threshold being applied, then recall or
sensitivity is calculated as follows.
x
recall or sensitivity = (21)
z
These two error metrics are used in Section 3.6.3 to compare the
recommendations produced by the methods.
316 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322

Table 1
Datasets.
Dataset #Ratings #Users #Items Sparsity (%) Rating scale Time Domain
Movielens 100k 100k 943 1 682 93.7 [1,5] 1995–2016 Movies
Movielens 1M 1M 6 040 3 952 95.81 [1,5] 2000–2003 Movies
Jester 1.8M >1.8M 24 938 100 27.40 [−10.00,10.00] 1999–2003 Jokes
Jester 4.1M >4.1M 73 421 100 43.67 [−10.00,10.00] 1999–2003 Jokes
Yahoo music 220k >220k 7 643 11 916 99.76 [1,5] 2002–2006 Music
Yahoo music 365k >365k 15 400 1 000 99.77 [1,5] 2002–2006 Music

Table 2 3.4. Parameter settings and training data ratio

Different parameters for different datasets.
Dataset #Factors Hidden sizes Batch size Dropout RMSE One thing observable is that settings of the parameters largely
User Item vary across the datasets, and this is explicable. For larger datasets, it
200 200 (300,300,300) 250 0.0 4.1824 is reasonable to increase the capacity of the network by introducing
Jester 1.8M 100 300 (300,300,300) 250 0.0 4.1526 more hidden layers, incorporating more hidden units, and intro-
50 300 (600,600,450) 400 0.5 4.1128 ducing more user and item factors. But the number of user factors
Jester 4.1M
200 200 (450,450,450) 500 0.0 4.1520 and the number of item factors require a little more insight. For
50 400 (450,450,500) 500 0.5 4.0873 Jester 4.1M, we have achieved optimal results with #user factors
Movielens 100k
50 50 (100,500) 100 0.0 0.9101 = 50 and #item factors = 400. In average, we have each user 56
50 50 (200,1000) 100 0.5 0.8965 jokes rated, and each joke rated by 41 363 users. So it is very natural
120 200 (200,1000) 500 0.0 0.8532 that the items would have more variances than the users would.
Movielens 1M 150 250 (200,1000) 300 0.0 0.8463 We need more units to confront this larger variance in the items.
150 250 (200,1000) 500 0.5 0.8110
Therefore, it is reasonable to have more item factors than the user
50 100 (150, 150) 100 0.0 0.9649 factors. The number of factors, itself, required empirical settings.
Yahoo music 220k
50 100 (150, 150) 100 0.15 0.9470
In any dataset where the number of users is less than the number
30 50 (150,150) 100 0.0 0.9678 of items we had less user factors than item factors. The capacity
Yahoo music 365k
30 50 (100,50) 100 0.15 0.9408
of the network needs to be larger while working on Jester as the
rating range is greater than any other datasets.

3.3. Experiments 3.4.1. The impact of batch size

Different datasets require different activation functions. For ex-
ample, Jester contains continuous ratings from −10.00 to +10.00.
Therefore, our units should be able to produce negative ratings.
That is why we have employed tanh units at each layer for Jester. As
there is no negative rating involved in other datasets (i.e., Movie-
lens, Yahoo music), we have got logistic units at each hidden layer
for them.
Each dataset required different settings of the parameters. Al-
though it was not mandatory for our model to have the same
number of units at the first hidden layer as the number of factors
at the input layer, it turned out that when both these numbers
were same the learning became smooth and the network produced
better results. Table 2 shows sensitivity of our network to different
settings of the parameters. The column, Hidden sizes, in the table
excludes the first hidden layer of the network as it is mandatory
to have this layer in the network. The weights at this layer are
the factor detectors. We had only one output unit, so it could
only produce a real-valued rating r, 0 ≤ r ≤ 1 (for the logistic
activation), or −1 ≤ r ≤ 1 (for the tanh activation). Therefore,
we scaled down the rating for Jester dataset by a factor of 10,
and for others, by a factor of 5. We fed the user and item factors
into the network in mini-batches. The mini-batch learning is very
important in our case; in addition to faster convergence, it helps
the model generalize well on factorization (see Section 3.4.1).
For each of the datasets we set the initial learning rate η to
0.005. If, for any four consecutive epochs, the validation loss had
not lowered, we decreased η by a factor of 1.1. For the entries
in Table 2 where dropout is 0.0, we stopped learning when the
validation error started to increase. When we incorporated the
regularizer (i.e., dropout set to the non zero), we stopped learning
once value of η fell less than 10−5 . All the RMSEs reported in Table 2
are achieved when the dataset was divided into 80:10:10 ratio for
training, validation, and test purposes respectively.
The optimal batch size differs extensively across the datasets.
The batch size reveals the character of the dataset. Our optimiza-
tion objective amounts to two specializations: factorizing the users
and items and modeling the relationship. For a dataset, if an op-
timal (or a suboptimal) parameter setting is found in a smaller
batch size, then it means factorizing the users and the items at a
greater granular level is more important than (or at least as much
important as) modeling the relationship and vice versa. This is
so because the gradient received for a larger batch size carries
a moderate update rule for the randomly initialized factors. The
variance in the rating triples for larger batches is typically greater
than the variance in rating triples for smaller batches. These greater
variance in the user behaviors and item characteristics tend to
balance out each other and to receive a moderate update rule.
On the other hand, for a smaller batch size the balancing out is
comparatively primitive and the update rule is stronger for the
factors. The most extreme scenario for this experiment is when the
batch size is set to one. Even after days of training (in a machine
containing intel core i7 octa-core processor and 32 GB of memory),
the learning curve does not converge; instead, it seems to zigzag in
the parameter space. The impact of batch size in dataset from each
domain is shown in Fig. 4.
3.4.2. Training data ratio
Factorizing the users and the items distinctively greatly impacts
the rating predictions. This is empirically shown in Fig. 5. If the
dataset is split into smaller training size and larger test size, the
system gets to see individual users and items very little. Thus
the randomly initialized user and item factors are not adjusted
properly. This affects prediction.
In Fig. 5 we have plotted the relative RMSE with respect to
training data ratio. For example, if for any dataset d our system
incurred maximum RMSE Rmax and minimum RMSE Rmin , then
(d)
normalized RMSE of R for dataset d, Rnorm , is calculated follows.
R
R(d)
norm = (22)
Rmax − Rmin
 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322 317

Fig. 4. The bar diagrams show the impact of batch size in rating predictions. For Movielens 1M and Jester datasets, modeling the relationship in factors is more important
(or as much important as) factorizing the users and items. On the other hand, for Yahoo 365k, the factorization is more important than modeling the relationship.

Fig. 5. The impact of factorizing the users and the items is shown here in the subplots for four datasets. The other two datasets (Yahoo 220k and Movielens 100k) have been
skipped because they are too small for this experiment.

The plot reveals very important characteristics of how the sys-
tem learns. The model learns the most for initial increments of the
dataset (i.e., when the training data ratio is increased to 20% to
50%). In these increments, the model sees more novel users and
items than in any other increments, and this drastically brings
down the test set errors. The error lines do flatten out after the
stage where the model does not see enough novel users or items.
The only space for improvement left after this stage is by adjust-
ing the factors and by modeling the relationship in the opposite
direction of the error gradient. It should be noted that the different
training data ratios have been discussed here only to show how
these affect learning of the model. When the final RMSE incurred
on any dataset is reported in this paper, the dataset is split into
80:10:10 for training, validation, and test purposes respectively.
3.5. Factorization and rating analysis
In this section, we analyze the ratings produced by our model
with two users from Movielens 100k dataset, and based on the
finding we seek to answer to our first research question that
whether it is possible to construct user profiles and item charac-
teristics solely based on the rating triples. The dataset contains the
318 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322

links to the movie information: its releasing year, genre, etc. These Table 3
are very good features for a movie and certainly will have an impact Comparison with other models in terms of RMSE.

on the ratings. The users are anonymized; the two users we have Model RMSE

picked have ids 450 and 405 respectively. Let us call them user a J 1.8M J 4.1M ML 100k ML 1M YM 220k YM 365k
and user b. Pearson vector similarity 4.6307 4.6280 1.0427 1.0003 1.2765 1.2761
User a has rated a total of 488 movies. Only 31 movies have Cosine vector similarity 4.6100 4.6215 1.0385 0.9983 1.2752 1.2752
Funk-SVD 4.2829 4.2221 0.9538 0.9243 1.0005 0.9997
been rated below 2 (in discrete scale 1–5) by him. So he rates SVD++ 4.1472 4.1316 0.9096 0.8427 0.9676 0.9670
movies generously. But there are some genres which he dislikes Matrix factorization using 4.1465 4.1379 0.9008 0.8470 0.9701 0.9723
mostly; these are comedy, adventure, and drama. He mostly gave user generated content
very low ratings on these genres. We, therefore, had picked a Multiple kernelized 4.1369 4.1282 0.9091 0.8297 0.9502 0.9479
matrix factorization
movie Up Close and Personal and fed already learned preferences
Robust convolutional 4.2279 4.1951 0.9003 0.8470 0.9618 0.9582
of a and characteristics of this movie to our trained network. The matrix factorization
genre of the movie is romance. Our network produced a rating NUIF 4.1128 4.0873 0.8965 0.8110 0.9470 0.9408
3.876 whereas he had actually rated the movie 4. We again picked *ML: Movielens, *YM: Yahoo music, *J: Jester. The models have been reproduced.
two movies Beverly Hillbillies, and Half Baked. Both of them are of
genre comedy. The network produced a rating 1.531 and 1.508
respectively whereas he had rated both of them 1. Clearly, the
Matrix factorization using user-generated content (MF-UGC). [40]
network has learned the useful features of the movies (although
exploits user generated contents on top of matrix factorization, and
we told nothing about them) and the preferences of user a. Another
makes predictions.
movie was picked, Brassed Off ; the genre of this movie is comedy,
romance, and drama. The network produced rating 2.994 whereas Robust convolutional matrix factorization (R-CONVMF). [35] uses
the actual rating he had given is 5. One possible explanation can contextual information and detects useful user and item features
be, although, the movie was of genre he did not like, he might have in lower convolutional layers.
been impressed by some other accidental factors (e.g., acting of
lead roles, romantic background, and others). 3.6.1. Comparison in terms of RMSE
User b has rated 657 movies. On average, he rated each movie The comparison of the models in terms of RMSE is given in
1.85. But there are genres (e.g., comedy, drama, science fiction) on Table 3. The RMSEs of the models compared here have been pro-
which he rated generously. We picked movie Philadelphia and fed duced when the dataset was split into 80:10:10 for training, val-
its factors and b’s preferences to our network. The network pro- idation, and test purposes. In average, our model has predicted
duced a rating 3.739 whereas b had actually rated 5. The network more accurate ratings on all datasets as compared to the other
was able both in factorizing user b and movie Philadelphia, and models. The improvement made by our model is marginal for
in modeling the relationship to some extent. We then picked the smaller datasets like Movielens 100k or Yahoo music 220k. But
movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (of genre science fiction), and the the improvement scales with the size of the dataset. For example,
network produced a rating for this movie 3.71 whereas b actually Jester 4.1M contains more than 4 million ratings and our model
had rated 5. Finally, we picked the movie A stranger in the house (of has incurred an RMSE that is decisively smaller than previous best
genre thriller). The network produced rating 1.65 whereas actual RMSE.
rating was 1. In Table 3, PVS and CVS are two methods which was solely based
The network was not given any prior information about users on the similarity measurements and on the statistical assumption
and movies. Still, it has managed to find out some distinctive that similar users will have similar interaction with similar items
features of the users and items so that it could produce a better which we have already discussed in Section 1. In our method,
fit to the data. This answers our first research question. It is indeed we have emphasized on nuances in the user behaviors as well
possible to construct the user profiles and the item characteristics as in the item characteristics, and it is clearly visible in Table 3
reasonably well based on the rating triples. that our method has incurred very significantly lower RMSEs than
each of these two methods. This corroborates our second research
question, and indeed, rating predictions were more accurate as we
3.6. Comparison among models
have treated each user and each item individually.
In the same table, there are a number of matrix factorization
We now give comparisons of our model with some best existing
methods (e.g., SVD++, Robust convolutional matrix factorization,
models on these datasets. The results of the other models have
multiple kernelized matrix factorization, etc.) which treat the fac-
been reproduced. The models that we compare our model with are
tors linearly. We have incurred lower RMSEs than each of them.
described now.
Although for smaller datasets (e.g., Movielens 100k) the improve-
Funk-SVD. This model is implemented using the method of [39]. ment is not very significant, the improvement made on a larger
This is slightly a different version of standard SVD. dataset is strongly visible (e.g., in Jester 4.1M we have incurred
RMSE ∼4.087 whereas the second lowest accuracy is, incurred by
SVD++. This model is based on an extensive usage of SVD, and it multiple kernelized matrix factorization method, ∼4.128). There-
modifies the standard SVD a lot [6]. It expects a temporal dimen- fore, we can answer our third research question that although for
sion in dataset and we gave this information to it. Our model does smaller datasets the improvement made by our method over the
not require such temporal information. linear methods are insignificant, for larger datasets the improve-
Multiple kernelized matrix factorization (MKMF). This model [8] is ment is significant.
similar to the other matrix factorization techniques employing
collaborative filtering. It combines multiple kernels and produces 3.6.2. Comparison in terms of temporal modeling
slightly better results. The architecture of our system does not accommodate explicit
temporal modeling. Temporal modeling means capturing the dy-
Pearson vector similarity (PVS) and Cosine vector similarity (CVS). namic behavior of the users and the changing characteristics of
Both of these models are essentially the same [14]. The only dif- the items. As we have not designed it explicitly, it is very hard
ference is in how they measure similarity among items. to conclude whether the system has captured the dynamism in
 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322
user behaviors and item characteristics or not just by looking into
the learned factors and bottommost layer weights. We picked
Movielens 1M dataset to analyze the final output produced by
various methods on the basis of temporal modeling. This dataset
has been picked because the ratings of this dataset span more than
20 years which is greater than any other datasets. These ratings
in the dataset have an associated column of timestamps (i.e., the
time when the ratings were given). We divided the test set users
into a number of categories. For any category c we set a threshold
tc so that each user in c has a rating span of at least tc days. This is
summarized in Table 4.
Although our system is not provided with any temporal infor-
mation, if the dataset has a property that its users’ behaviors or
items’ characteristics change radically through time, the system
has to adjust the weights in between the bottommost layer and
the first hidden layer (i.e., weights W (2) ) and the factors in factor
layer (i.e., Fu and Fi ) in such a way that it can minimize the error
(see optimization objective in Section 2.2.3 and in Section 2.2.4).
This, although very implicitly, amounts to temporal modeling. The
effectiveness of our temporal modeling is shown in Fig. 6. The
RMSE of each of the models are plotted against each category. For
the portion of the test set where each user had at least two hundred
days of ratings, NUIF incurred a comparatively lower RMSE. But
as soon as the users stayed for longer in the dataset, the rating
predictions made by NUIF did not scale as compared to some other
methods. For the larger values of tc (say, 900) our model incurred
more RMSE than R-CONVMF model (which had used contextual
information).
3.6.3. Comparison in terms of recommendations
The final comparative analysis of the models in this section is
now given in terms of precision versus recall plots in Fig. 7. We have
selected three datasets from different domains (i.e., Jester 4.1M,
Movielens 1M, and Yahoo music 365k). The plots are not based
on the whole test set; instead, we have randomly picked 1000 test
Table 4
Movielens 1M dataset categorized according to tc values.
# Minimum spanning days tc # Test users
1 200
2 300
3 400
4 500
5 600
6 700
7 800
8 900
9 1000
Fig. 6. RMSE incurred by different methods with respect to the users having different days.
319
samples T from each domain (i.e., jokes, movies, and music) and
plotted the points. For any dataset d, we tried out several values
of threshold θd . Each of the values of θd was applied on T , and
precision and recall were calculated by using Eqs. (20) and (21).
Precision shows the ratio of the number of correct items recom-
mended by the model to the total number of items recommended.
On the other hand, recall shows the ratio of the number of correct
items recommended to the number agreed by θd .
Fig. 7a shows the precision versus recall curves of all the models
on 1000 random test examples on Jester 4.1M dataset. Our model
has provided a better improvement in finding more relevant prod-
ucts than the neighborhood models (e.g., Pearson vector similarity
(PVS) and Cosine vector similarity (CVS) are the bottommost two
curves). Other factorization models like MKMF provided very sim-
ilar performance when the recall was smaller. But once the thresh-
old θjester divided the test examples into roughly equal number of
more relevant items and less relevant items, our model has always
produced better recommendations (e.g., see the NUIF curve from
recall in range [0.3–0.8]).
Fig. 7b also shows that our model almost always produced
better recommendations. There are some large recall values for
which other factorization models produced similar or better rec-
ommendations than our model. This indicates that the improve-
ments achieved by our model on Movielens is not as good as on
Jester. This makes sense. Jester dataset is more than four times
larger than Movielens. Our deep model has, therefore, specialized
more on Jester than on Movielens. But still, in the most cases it
produced better recommendations than the other models.
Fig. 7c shows the precision of the model versus recall on Yahoo
365k. The dataset is significantly smaller than the previous two. As
expected, although our model produced better recommendations
on the most cases, there are more instances where other factor-
ization models have produced similar or better recommendations
(when recall > 0.8) as compared to previous two datasets.
3.7. Impact of rating predictions and recommendation quality on
obtained results
The obtained results show a broad range of characteristics of our
approach. The prediction accuracy improved for each dataset when
96 more hidden units were incorporated and dropout (i.e., randomly
75 omitting some of the units at each iteration) enabled. That implies,
60 with a proper regularization technique present, if we increase the
49
40
capacity of our network, it models the relation between users and
37 items better. This observation is important, mainly because it hints,
22 at the lower layers (i.e., input layer and first hidden layer), separate
12 learner connections were helping the model factorize the users and
5
the items well (as shown with examples in Section 3.5) while the
320 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322

Fig. 7. Precision versus recall for three different datasets. As we go to the right along the horizontal axis, the number of relevant items increases after the threshold θ being
applied. When value of θ is moderate (i.e., the value is around near of the middle value of rating range) the number of more relevant items roughly equals to the number of
less relevant items. Precision drops when this happens. Every model in each of the plots here finds it easy to recommend item when θ is either strong or weak.

upper layer connections were modeling the relationship among
the factors.
Another important insight is that for all of the data domains, as
the size of the dataset gets larger our prediction accuracy improves.
For example, in Movielens 100k dataset the RMSE incurred by
our model was ∼0.89 (see Table 2), but as the size of the dataset
increased by ten times (in Movielens 1M), the RMSE dropped to as
low as ∼0.81. Such improvement is also visible for other datasets.
This shows our method produces ratings with better accuracy as
the size of the dataset grows. For a larger amount of ratings, we are
able to factorize the users and the items in a more granular way in
the lower layers. This helps the upper layers to utilize these learned
factors to produce better ratings.
In Section 2.2.3 we had analytically justified why we had split
the connections in the first hidden layer. We now give an empirical
justification of the impact of separate learners. To see that in
practice, we ran our system on all six datasets with the same
configurations, but instead of using separate learners, we fully
connected the first hidden layer to the factor layer. The results
are summarized in Table 5. For each dataset, training RMSE is
significantly lower when separate learning is not enabled. The test
error, on the other hand, is ostensibly lower for separate learning.
The fully connected configurations have more connections to
model the accidental regularities in the ratings. Capturing such
accidental regularities causes the model to overfit the data; hence,
while the training error decreases, the test error increases. More-
over, the connections at this layer are not allowed to specialize
in either type of factors exclusively. Thus, the units at the first
hidden layer cannot distinguish between the two types of units
(i.e., user factors and item factors) at the input layer. Therefore,
when the units at the first hidden layer propagates the error back
to the input layer they provide a balanced gradient. Thus, the
factors, at the input layer, do not receive the actual gradient but
an error gradient which has been counter-balanced by other type
of factors. This messes up learning in user profile and item charac-
teristics building, and causes to factorize the users and the items
improperly. The network does not learn each user and each item
individually, rather, it is compelled to learn the interaction of each
individual pairs of user and item (what we already do in the higher
layers; actually, the full connection between the factor layer and
the first hidden layer just adds an extra layer when modeling the
relationship). These empirical results hint that separate learning
helps the model generalize well and it enables the system to model
the user profiles and the item characteristics more precisely.
In Section 3.6.3, we have showed the recommendations made
by our method and the other models, and observed that our im-
provement which had been strongly visible in terms of ratings do
not hold as much strong in case of recommendations, and even
for some higher recall values our method produced worse recom-
mendations as compared to some other models. This is because, in
several studies, it has been observed that improvements in terms
of RMSE do not translate into recommendation quality as much
expected [41]. Our study had the objective to bring down the
error in rating predictions, and therefore, this discrepancy exists
in recommendation quality of our system.
4. Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed a method that emphasizes on fac-
torizing each user and each item individually to overcome the
 B. Purkaystha, T. Datta, Md.S. Islam et al. / Applied Soft Computing Journal 75 (2019) 310–322
Table 5
Impact of separate learning.
Dataset No separate learners
Training RMSE Test RMSE R1 Training RMSE
Jester 1.8M 2.0138 4.4304
Jester 4.1M 1.9632 4.4557
Movielens 100k 0.5076 0.9208
Movielens 1M 0.4810 0.8553
Yahoo 220k 0.4622 0.9731
Yahoo 365k 0.4597 0.9710
limitation of the statistical assumption that the similar users will
have similar opinions on an item. The main contribution of our
work lies in how we model each user profile and each item char-
acteristic without using any demographic information. This way
of factorization is particularly helpful in scenarios where only a
huge amount of rating data exists without any explicit information
about the users or the items. We have also contributed in elimi-
nating the limitation of the traditional linear factorization models
(i.e., the number of user factors and the number of item factors be
the same) as our deep model allows any number of factor units at
the bottommost layer. We constructed the user behaviors and the
item characteristics in the factor layer (i.e., the bottommost layer)
and modeled the relationship in the upper layers. We have shown
that our model produces better predictions than the other factor-
ization models and the models which use contextual information
or content information.
Although we have shown the quality of recommendations pro-
duced by our model to compare it with others, our main objec-
tive was to minimize the error in rating predictions. It is a well
known fact that the recommendation quality does not necessarily
scale with root mean squared errors. A further investigation can
be conducted which would seek to measure the effectiveness of
the given architecture in terms of the recommendations it makes
rather than the ratings. Another investigation can be made by using
demographic information of the users and the items along with
constructed factors to observe how this hybrid factorization model
works in terms of both rating predictions and recommendation
quality. Additionally, as in this work we have not confronted the
cold start problem, a serious dilemma when a new user or item is
introduced in the system which was not involved in any rating, a
study can be run on how to confront this problem with keeping
other advantages of our system intact.
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