Optimal Sequential Recommendations: Exploiting User and Item Structure

We consider an online model for recommendation systems, with each user being recommended an item at each time-step and providing ’like’ or ’dislike’ feedback. A latent variable model specifies the user preferences: both users and items are clustered into types. The model captures structure in both the item and user spaces, as used by item-item and user-user collaborative filtering algorithms. We study the situation in which the type preference matrix has i.i.d. entries. Our main contribution is an algorithm that simultaneously uses both item and user structures, proved to be near-optimal via corresponding information-theoretic lower bounds. In particular, our analysis highlights the sub-optimality of using only one of item or user structure (as is done in most collaborative filtering algorithms).