Efficient and High-quality Recommendations via Momentum-incorporated Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent-Based Learning

摘要

A recommender system(RS)relying on latent factor analysis usually adopts stochastic gradient descent(SGD)as its learning algorithm.However,owing to its serial mechanism,an SGD algorithm suffers from low efficiency and scalability when handling large-scale industrial problems.Aiming at addressing this issue,this study proposes a momentum-incorporated parallel stochastic gradient descent(MPSGD)algorithm,whose main idea is two-fold:a)implementing parallelization via a novel datasplitting strategy,and b)accelerating convergence rate by integrating momentum effects into its training process.With it,an MPSGD-based latent factor(MLF)model is achieved,which is capable of performing efficient and high-quality recommendations.Experimental results on four high-dimensional and sparse matrices generated by industrial RS indicate that owing to an MPSGD algorithm,an MLF model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art ones in both computational efficiency and scalability.