Collaborative filtering (CF) is a successful approach commonly used by many
recommender systems. Conventional CF-based methods use the ratings given to
items by users as the sole source of information for learning to make
recommendation. However, the ratings are often very sparse in many
applications, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their
recommendation performance. To address this sparsity problem, auxiliary
information such as item content information may be utilized. Collaborative
topic regression (CTR) is an appealing recent method taking this approach which
tightly couples the two components that learn from two different sources of
information. Nevertheless, the latent representation learned by CTR may not be
very effective when the auxiliary information is very sparse. To address this
problem, we generalize recent advances in deep learning from i.i.d. input to
non-i.i.d. (CF-based) input and propose in this paper a hierarchical Bayesian
model called collaborative deep learning (CDL), which jointly performs deep
representation learning for the content information and collaborative filtering
for the ratings (feedback) matrix. Extensive experiments on three real-world
datasets from different domains show that CDL can significantly advance the
state of the art.

本研究提出了一种层次贝叶斯模型，名为 CDL，其通过深度表示学习和协作过滤来处理稀疏的推荐数据，并在三个真实世界数据集上验证了其有效性。