Nonlinear Inductive Matrix Completion based on One-layer Neural Networks

The goal of a recommendation system is to predict the interest of a user in a given item by exploiting the existing set of ratings as well as certain user/item features. A standard approach to modeling this problem is Inductive Matrix Completion where the predicted rating is modeled as an inner product of the user and the item features projected onto a latent space. In order to learn the parameters effectively from a small number of observed ratings, the latent space is constrained to be low-dimensional which implies that the parameter matrix is constrained to be low-rank. However, such bilinear modeling of the ratings can be limiting in practice and non-linear prediction functions can lead to significant improvements. A natural approach to introducing non-linearity in the prediction function is to apply a non-linear activation function on top of the projected user/item features. Imposition of non-linearities further complicates an already challenging problem that has two sources of non-convexity: a) low-rank structure of the parameter matrix, and b) non-linear activation function. We show that one can still solve the non-linear Inductive Matrix Completion problem using gradient descent type methods as long as the solution is initialized well. That is, close to the optima, the optimization function is strongly convex and hence admits standard optimization techniques, at least for certain activation functions, such as Sigmoid and tanh. We also highlight the importance of the activation function and show how ReLU can behave significantly differently than say a sigmoid function. Finally, we apply our proposed technique to recommendation systems and semi-supervised clustering, and show that our method can lead to much better performance than standard linear Inductive Matrix Completion methods.