Factorization Machines

Factorization Machines: Developing accurate recommender systems for a specific problem setting seems to be a complicated and time-consuming task: models have to be defined, learning algorithms derived and implementations written. In this talk, I present the factorization machine (FM) model which is a generic factorization approach that allows to be adapted to problems by feature engineering. Efficient FM learning algorithms are discussed among them SGD, ALS/CD and MCMC inference including automatic hyperparameter selection. I will show on several tasks, including the Netflix prize and KDDCup 2012, that FMs are flexible and generate highly competitive accuracy. With FMs these results can be achieved by simple data preprocessing and without any tuning of regularization parameters or learning rates.

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