Synergizing local and global models for matrix approximation

Ensemble matrix approximation (MA) methods have achieved promising performance in collaborative filtering, many of which perform matrix approximation on multiple submatrices of user-item ratings in parallel and then combine the predictions from the sub-models for higher efficiency. However, data partitioning could lead to suboptimal accuracy due to the lack of capturing structural information related to most or all users/items. This paper proposes a new ensemble learning framework, in which the local models and global models are synergetically updated from each other. This makes it possible to capture both local associations in user-item subgroups and global structures over all users and items. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms six state-of-the-art methods in recommendation accuracy with decent scalability.