Conditioned Variational Autoencoder for Top-N Item Recommendation

State-of-the-art recommender systems (RSs) generally try to improve the overall recommendation quality. However, users usually tend to explicitly filter the item set based on available categories, e.g., smartphone brands, movie genres. For this reason, an RS that can make this step automatically is likely to increase the user’s experience. This paper proposes a Conditioned Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) for constrained top-N item recommendation where the recommended items must satisfy a given condition. The proposed model architecture is similar to a standard VAE in which a condition vector is fed into the encoder. The constrained ranking is learned during training thanks to a new reconstruction loss that takes the input condition into account. We show that our model generalizes the state-of-the-art Mult-VAE collaborative filtering model. Experimental results underline the potential of C-VAE in providing accurate recommendations under constraints. Finally, the performed analyses suggest that C-VAE can be used in other recommendation scenarios, such as context-aware recommendation.