Low-rank and sparse matrix factorization for scientific paper recommendation in heterogeneous network

Abstract

With the rapid growth of scientific publications, it is hard for researchers to acquire appropriate papers that meet their expectations. Recommendation system for scientific articles is an essential technology to overcome this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank and sparse matrix factorization-based paper recommendation (LSMFPRec) method for authors. The proposed method seamlessly combines low-rank and sparse matrix factorization method with fine-grained paper and author affinity matrixes that are extracted from heterogeneous scientific network. Thus, it can effectively alleviate the sparsity and cold start problems that exist in traditional matrix factorization based collaborative filtering methods. Moreover, LSMFPRec can significantly reduce the error propagated from intermediate outputs. In addition, the proposed method essentially captures the low-rank and sparse characteristics that exist in scientific rating activities; therefore, it can generate more reasonable predicted ratings for influential and uninfluential papers. The effectiveness of the proposed LSMFPRec is demonstrated by the recommendation evaluation conducted on the AAN and CiteULike data sets.