Scalable and Explainable Linear Shallow Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering from Industrial Perspective
Vojtěch Vančura · 2023
The popularity of linear shallow autoencoders for collaborative filtering is growing in the research community, and internet industry providers of Recommender Systems are also taking notice. However, despite their simplicity and accuracy, these models often cannot be used in real-world industrial recommender systems due to their inability to scale to very large interaction matrices. Our research aims to address this issue by developing a scalable, explainable, and accurate shallow linear autoencoder method for collaborative filtering that meets the demands of real-world recommenders. In this paper, we present our industrial Ph.D. research project, which includes: (1) the development of a scalable method called ELSA and the adaptation of the method to a large real-world recommender and (2) the creation of a framework to visualize the recommender systems insights based on modeling the distribution of retrieval metrics in latent user space. We discuss the current status of our project, the key steps to finish the project, and the possible future extensions after the dissertation.