Personalized recommender systems based on latent factor
models are widely used to increase sales in e-commerce. Such
systems use the past behavior of users to recommend new
items that are likely to be of interest to them. However,
latent factor model suffer from sparse user-item interaction
in online shopping data: for a large portion of items that
do not have sufficient purchase records, their latent factors
cannot be estimated accurately.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach that automatically
discovers the taxonomies from online shopping data
and jointly learns a taxonomy-based recommendation system.
Out model is non-parametric and can learn the taxonomy
structure automatically from the data. Since the
taxonomy allows purchase data to be shared between items,
it effectively improves the accuracy of recommending tail
items by sharing strength with the more frequent items. Experiments
on a large-scale online shopping dataset confirm
that our proposed model improves significantly over state-ofthe-art
latent factor models. Moreover, our model generates
high-quality and human readable taxonomies. Finally, using
the algorithm-generated taxonomy, our model even outperforms
latent factor models based on the human-induced
taxonomy, thus alleviating the need for costly manual taxonomy
generation.