Applied Intelligence

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-018-01402-3

User profile as a bridge in cross-domain recommender systems

for sparsity reduction
Ashish Kumar Sahu1 · Pragya Dwivedi1

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
In the past two decades, recommender systems have been successfully applied in many e-commerce companies. One of
the promising techniques to generate personalized recommendations is collaborative filtering. However, it suffers from
sparsity problem. Alleviating this problem, cross-domain recommender systems came into existence in which transfer
learning mechanism is applied to exploit the knowledge from other related domains. While applying transfer learning, some
information should overlap between source and target domains. Several attempts have been made to enhance the performance
of collaborative filtering with the help of other related domains in cross-domain recommender systems framework. Although
exploiting the knowledge from other domains is still challenging and open problem in recommender systems. In this paper,
we propose a method namely User Profile as a Bridge in Cross-domain Recommender Systems (UP-CDRSs) for transferring
knowledge between domains through user profile. Firstly, we build a user profile using demographical information of a user,
explicit ratings and content information of user-rated items. Thereafter, the probabilistic graphical model is employed to
learn latent factors of users and items in both domains by maximizing posterior probability. At last prediction on unrated item
is estimated by an inner product of corresponding latent factors of users and items. Validating of our proposed UP-CDRSs
method, we conduct series of experiments on various sparsity levels using cross-domain dataset. The results demonstrate
that our proposed method substantially outperforms other without and with transfer learning methods in terms of accuracy.

Keywords Cross-domain recommender systems · Recommender systems · Transfer learning · User profile ·
Matrix factorization

1 Introduction is one of the most promising techniques in recent years. CF

With development and explosion of Internet technologies
and continuous growth of accessibility of the World Wide
Web, the amount of digital information generated by
humans increases exponentially. We become more easily
overwhelmed by huge amount of information and unable to
find what we really desire. Recommendation Systems (RSs)
[1, 2] are the software tool that help us to find most relevant
items out of millions of items in the database. Several
techniques [3–5] are used for generating personalized
recommendations, among them Collaborative Filtering (CF)
 Ashish Kumar Sahu
sahuashishcs@gmail.com
Pragya Dwivedi
pragyadwi86@mnnit.ac.in
1 Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad,
Prayagraj, 211004, India
focuses on user preferences data which are provided by the
user explicitly such as, numerical ratings, like/dislike, etc.
It can be classified into two categories: memory-based and
model-based. The former category of method focuses on
similarity strategy between co-rated users or items, followed
by TopK Neighbors (kNN) selection and then weighted
average strategy is used for prediction. There exist multiple
variations [5–8] of memory-based CF, these are based on
the similarity measure modification and the topK neighbor
selection.
In the case of model-based CF or Latent Factor Model
(LFM), firstly the model is constructed, and then prediction
can be made. One of the leading methods in this category
is Matrix Factorization (MF) [9] in which both items and
users characterize in small number of factors that infer from
the user-item rating matrix. Multiple variations [10–14] of
MF have been proposed by several researchers with their
limitations.
Although CF gains great success in recent years, one
of the major problems is data sparsity because users provide

their feedbacks (in terms of numerical ratings) in limited
number of items out of millions of items. Using sparse data
for generating the predictions followed by recommenda-
tions, the system may degrade the performance. Addressing
this problem of CF, several authors have provided their solu-
tions by using additional feedbacks with in-domain such as
likes/dislikes [15, 16], users reviews [17], history records
[18], etc. and tried to mitigate the sparsity problem.
Rather focusing on heterogeneous feedbacks with in-
domain, another solution to this problem is Cross-domain
Recommender Systems (CDRSs) [19–22] in which lever-
aging the knowledge from other related additional domains
(source domains) to improve the performance of the tar-
get domain. This type of strategy in CDRSs can be done
by transfer learning mechanism [23]. Transfer learning is a
new paradigm of machine learning which aims to transfer
some useful knowledge from one or more source domains
to the target domain in order to increase the performance of
the target domain with some assumptions. While applying
transfer learning in CDRSs, two assumptions are: 1) data
sparsity of a source domain must be dense compare to tar-
get one 2) some information must overlap between source
and target domains. According to [24], CDRSs model can
be categorized into three types based on the overlapping
of users/items between source and target domains, i.e.,
fully users/items overlap, partially users/items overlap and
non-overlap users and items.
This paper focuses on the third category of CDRSs
model, i.e., non-overlap of users and items. In this category,
two approaches have been proposed: tags information
transfer [25–28] and rating pattern knowledge transfer [19].
In the first approach, tags (a lightweight user review in text
form) should be common in both domains. A limitation of
tag-based transfer learning methods in CDRSs model is that
it is too expensive to find overlap tags between domains.
Another approach of non-overlap users and items cate-
gory is rating pattern transfer knowledge. Li, et al. [19] have
proposed Codebook Transfer (CBT) method wherein com-
pact rating pattern extracted from a source domain and then
transferred to the target domain. The authors have focused
on numerical rating feedbacks only and assumed that both
domains share the same rating distribution. But in a practi-
cal scenario, every domain has its rating distribution that we
can not assume to be the same.
In this paper, we propose a novel method namely User
Profile as a Bridge in Cross-domain Recommender Systems
(UP-CDRSs) for exploiting the knowledge from source
domain in order to enhance prediction accuracy of the target
domain. This paper focuses on an additional domain in
which neither users nor items overlap between domains,
and tag information is also not available in both domains.
According to [23], some information should overlap
between domains, therefore, for building the bridge, we
A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi
focus on implicit information of users as well as items.
In case of user side internal information, it may be
demographical data such as user’s age, gender, occupation,
etc., and content information of an item (the set of genres
if a movie as an item) as item side internal information,
for instance, if we focus on two different movie domains,
these types of information may common in both domains.
The novelty of proposed method with existing methods
is that we can be able to exploit the knowledge of an
additional domain even no explicit information overlap
between domains, i.e., overlap users and items, overlap
tags, etc.
In our proposed method, we combine both domains
information through graphical model theory [29] in which
user latent factors, item latent factors, rating and similarity
of users profile between distinct domains work as random
variables. We then solve the graphical model and maximize
the posterior probability of user latent factors and item latent
factors of both domains.
The proposed method consists four fold: firstly, we
build a user profile in both domains using demographical
information of a user, explicit ratings (provided by a
user) and content information of user-rated items. We then
calculate the similarity between users profile of distinct
domains. After that, we build the probabilistic graphical
model where each node represents a random variable,
and links express probabilistic relationships between these
variables. Random variables in our proposed UP-CDRSs
method are: a vector of user latent factors, a vector of item
latent factors, rating information and similarity of users
profile. We solve the probabilistic graphical model the learn
latent factors of users and items in both domains. In last fold,
prediction is estimated on unrated items through an inner
product of corresponding latent factors of users and items in
the target domain. The major contributions of our work can
be summarized as follows:
– Presenting a new CDRSs method for exploiting the
knowledge from a source domain in order to enhance
the accuracy of the target domain. The knowledge is
transferred in terms of users profile which are built from
explicit ratings, internal information of users and items.
– Applying transfer learning in CDRSs, we need some
overlap information between the domains. The novelty
of our proposed method is that we focus on non-overlap
users and items category. Hence, we extract implicit
information of users and items for mapping the users
profile in distinct domains.
– To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt
in CDRSs model in which knowledge is transferred
in terms of internal information of users and items by
probabilistic graphical model where each node works
as random variable. After solving the graphical model
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...
by maximizing the posterior probability, we are able to
extract latent factors of users and items more precisely.
– Experiments are done on CDRSs non-overlap users
and items dataset. The proposed method is compared
with and without transfer learning methods. In without
transfer learning, we focused only the target domain
rating matrix and apply their approaches. In case of
transfer learning methods, we used two rating matrices
(source and target) domains data as training set and
applied their approaches. We used two evaluation
matrices and compared all existing related works with
our proposed UP-CDRSs method.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,
we introduce some basic definitions, mathematical nota-
tions and the problem formulation. The literature review is
described in Section 3 where we will briefly describe RSs,
CDRSs in transfer learning framework followed by related
works dealing with the problems of sparsity. In Section 4,
we describe our proposed UP-CDRSs method, after that we
show results of experiments those are conducted on cross-
domain dataset to verify the effectiveness of the proposed
method in Section 5. Finally, we conclude our work and
provide future direction in section Section 6.
2 Basic definitions, notations and the
problem formulation
In this section, we describe some basic definitions in
Section 2.1, followed by mathematical notations those
are used in this paper in Section 2.2 and the problem
formulation is described in Section 2.3.
2.1 Basic definitions
– Matrix factorization (MF): MF is one of the model-
based CF methods. The small assumption of MF is that
interaction between users and items is governed by a
small number of hidden factors called latent factors.
Therefore, the user and the item described in a vector
form and, the size of a vector is equal to the number of
hidden factors. For example, in a movie recommender
system, each movie measures the distribution of latent
factors (e.g., Science Fiction, Comedy, Action, Love,
etc.), and each user represents a user taste on those
latent factors. So, estimate overall user taste by an inner
product of corresponding user and item latent factors.
– Transfer learning: Transfer learning [23] or knowl-
edge transfer is a part of machine learning framework
that reapplies knowledge acquired from one or more
source domains to the target domain in order to improve
the performance of the target domain though we have
less amount of recorded data for learning the model.
While applying transfer learning framework, informa-
tion should overlap between domains.
In mathematics notation, the definitions of domain
and task are: A domain consists two
terms: A feature space , and marginal probability distri-
bution P(X ), where .
We can differentiate domains through both terms, i.e., if
two domains are different, then they may have different
feature space or different marginal probability distribu-
tion. In terms of machine learning framework, a dataset
is domain and using this, we have two components: a
label space Y and an objective function f (·). Second
term, A task T = {Y, f (·)}, we have to learn an objec-
tive function using training data which consists{xi , yi },
where xi ∈ X and yi ∈ Y . After that, learned function
f (·) used for prediction of a new instance x with corre-
sponding label.
– Cross-domain recommender systems (CDRSs):
CDRSs [20] are new framework for recommender
systems to mitigate the problems of traditional RSs
techniques. It uses additional information from one or
more source domains to improve the recommendations
quality of the target domain.
– User profile: A user profile is a representation of
knowledge and personal characteristics of a user. The
profiling information can be elicited from demograph-
ical information (e.g., user’s age, gender, occupation,
etc.), user-rated items, and content information such
as movie title, genre, director, etc.(in case of movie
domain) of those rated items. A user profile represents
in form of vector (refer in Fig. 7).
2.2 Notations
In this subsection, we describe notations which are used
throughout the paper. The list of notations as follows:
R̂i, j Prediction on item j to user i of the target domain
D k Domian k
S s t  Similartiy between users profile i and i’ in
Pi ,Pi 
domains and t, respectively
Pik User profile of user i in domain k
R k ∈ R N ×M
k k
User-item rating matrix of domain k
Ri,k j Rating provided by user i on item j in domain k
M k Number of users in domain k
N k Number of items in domain k
Uik ∈ R1× f A row vector of latent factor of user i in
domain k
f Number of latent factors

I k ∈ R N ×M
k k
Binary mask of rating martix R k
V jk ∈ R1× f A row vector of latent factor of item j in
domain k
2.3 Problem formulation
This subsection describes the motivation behind our
proposed method in the CDRSs framework. How transfer
learning is being done and what knowledge of source
domain is being exploited wherein users and items do not
overlap, the answers of both questions are described by
using an example.
Our solution for establishing a bridge between domains
is user profile. As we mentioned earlier, a user profile is
a representation of knowledge and personal characteristics
of a user. We can correlate two users of distinct domains
through users profile. If both users of distinct domains have
similar users profile, we can say that the behavior of both
users also be similar. For instance, user u is and user u it  have
Pis and Pit users profile. If both are similar in terms of users
profile, then similarity value of users profile S s t  tend
Pi ,Pi 
to be 1.
Another intuition is based on LFM model in which user’s
characteristics are represented in vector form. A vector of
latent factors represents how much his/her likes or dislikes
on each of latent factor. If two users belong two distinct
domains and latent vectors of both users have similar
likes/dislikes on all corresponding latent factors, then an
inner product of both vectors tend to be 1. For instance, user
u is and user u it  have Uis and Uit vectors of latent factors,
T
 s Uit U i  ≈ 1.
respectively, then s t
Two users u i , u i  have similar users profile and also
have similar likes/dislikes in form of latent factors, then the
T
difference S s t  - Uis Uit ≈ 0 . If the difference is not
Pi ,Pi 
tend to zero, error may present and it can be minimized
using only update latent factor values of users because user
profile values are static.
According to [23], applying transfer learning mechanism
to use the knowledge of source domain, some information
must overlap. In our case, users and items both disjoint but
Fig. 1 Illustration of source and
target domains user-item rating
matrices
A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi
content information of items and demographical data of a
user overlap. So, if both types of information also disjoint,
we can not exploit the knowledge of source domain.
According to our formulation, similarities between all users
profile of distinct domains would be zero and our solution
of cross-domain would be converted into a single-domain
RSs.
We take an example for better understanding. Figure 1
shows the user-item matrices of both domains. Source and
target domains are movie and book, respectively. There
are five users and six items in both domains. Ratings are
in numerical form{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ?}, where ’?’ represents
unrated items’ rating. In both domains, we initialize the
latent factor values of all users. Figure 2 shows users’ latent
factors where the size of f is 5. Additional information
about user and item are demographical information and
content information, respectively. In this example, we use
genre information as a content information. Five types of
genre as content information present on each item, i,e, each
item describes in five genres. If particular genre presents
on an item, mention 1 otherwise 0. Similarly, for user
demographical information, two types of demographic
information is presented: User’s age and gender. The pres-
ence of user’s age is in form of seven age ranges, i.e.,
1 − 17, 18 − 24, 25 − 34, 35 − 44, 45 − 50, 51 − 55, 56+,
and the presence user’s gender in from of ’M’/’F’ or
1/0. Figure 3 describes the content information of items
and demographical information of users. We can see that
content information and demographical information both
overlap between domains.
From Figs. 1, 2 and 3, some observations can be made as
follows:
In source domain, u s1 provided high ratings on item i 1
and item i 3 (refer in Fig. 1), and item i 1 and i 3 contain
g1 and g3 genres (refer Fig. 3 wherein the values of
(i 1 , g1 ) ; (i 1 , g3 ) ; (i 3 , g1 ) ; (i 3 , g3 ) are 1). Therefore, we can
say that the user u s1 prefers g1 and g3 genres comparability.
For detailed explanation, we have taken following three
scenarios from the target domain as:
Scenario 1: In target domain, u t7 provided high ratings
on item i 10 and item i 12 . Both items contain g1 and g3
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...
Fig. 2 Representation of users
latent factor in a 2-D matrix
( f = 5)
genres. i.e., we can also say that the user u t7 prefers g1
and g3 genres comparability. In terms of demographical
information, u s1 .age and u t7 .age belong same age group
and gender also same. Although both users belong
distinct domains, users (u s1 , u t7 ) are similar in terms of
characteristics and their behavior, so similarity between
both user’s profile S(1s ,7t ) ≈ 1. Moreover, their vectors
of latent factor (shown in Fig. 2) also be equal, i.e.,
T T
U1s U7t ≈ 1. So, difference S(1s ,7t ) − U1s U7t ≈ 0.
If the difference is not tend to zero, then error may be
present.
Scenario 2: In scenario 2, u t9 provided high ratings on
item i 11 and item i 12 , and both items contain g1 and g3
genres. In this scenario, we can also say that the user u t9
prefers g1 and g3 genres comparability. u s1 .age and u t9 .age
belong in the same age group and gender also a same
in terms of demographical information. In this scenario,
both users (u s1 , u t9 ) are also similar, so, S(1s ,9t ) ≈ 1. In
T
terms of latent vectors, U1s U9t ≈ I is not true. In this
situation, we have to adjust the latent factor values so that
error can be minimized.
Scenario 3: Similarly, u t10 provided high ratings on item i 8
and item i 9 . Both items contain g2 and g5 genres. u s1 .age
and u t10 .age are dissimilar, and gender also in opposite. In
this scenario, we also can say that users profile S(1s ,10t )
Fig. 3 Representation of
demographical data and content
information in a 2-D matrix
similarity tend to be zero, and their latent factors also
T t ≈ I is
should not be equal. But, the condition U1s U10
satisfied. If we calculate the error between users profile
t T , it
and their vectors of latent factor S(1s ,10t ) − U1s U10
must be high. Therefore, we also have to adjust the latent
factor values so that error can be minimized.
These scenarios boost the objective of our proposed
work. How to build a user profile, how to transfer learning
in CDRSs framework are being done and how to minimize
an error, all things are described in Section 4.
3 Literature review
In this section, we briefly describe recommender systems
and their techniques, limitations of their techniques
followed the existing solutions by leveraging the knowledge
from additional domains. After that, we describe related
works in detail.
RSs have been successfully applied in many areas such
as movies [3, 28, 30], social networks [31–33], music
[34], books [35, 36], medical science [37, 38], e-learning
[39] etc. Several techniques on RSs have been proposed
for recommendations to users. According to the literature

review paper [5], three filtering techniques are: Content-
based, collaborative and hybrid. Content-based filtering
approaches analyze a set of descriptions of items previously
rated by the user then create a profile of that user’s interests
on the basis of features of the rated items. In case of
collaborative filtering (CF), it focuses on explicit ratings
which are given by users in terms of their opinion on seen
items. A main hypothesis of CF is that if two users are
similar in past would similar in future. Hybrid RS technique
provides a combination both filtering and makes use of the
advantages of each technique. One of the gained filtering
techniques in recent years is CF because it is more versatile.
CF [1, 3, 4] can be classified into two categories:
memory-based and model-based. The former category
of methods focuses on similarity strategy between co-
rated users or items, followed by topK selection and
then weighted average of similarities with others co-rated
users or items for prediction. Various modified similarity
formule [6, 7, 40] have been proposed to calculate enrich
similarity between users or items. Although memory-based
CF provides good performance, it is not suitable for large
amount of database. In case of model-based methods,
firstly, we build a model through historical records and
then prediction can be made. Various models [8, 10–13]
have been proposed which are based on latent factor model.
Matrix factorization (MF) [9] is one of the most popular
models in model-based CF. MF tries to characterize user
and item in the small number of latent factors inferred
from ratings. This method was very popular in 2009 and it
played a central role in the Netflix competition.1 Although
CF gains great success in recent years, it still suffers from
sparsity problem and cold-start user/item problem [41]. The
reason of the sparsity problem is that users provide ratings
in limited number of items out of millions of items. The item
cold-start problem occurs when there is a new item that has
been transferred to the system, so no ratings are available on
the new items. Similarly, for the user cold-start problem, a
user just enter into a system and has not provided any ratings
on items.
Handling the cold-start user problem, the approach [42]
is to recommend a few items to a cold-start user and use
the feedback to learn a profile. Learned profile can then be
used to make good recommendations to the cold user. A key
question is how to select items to recommend to a cold-start
user. In the literature review paper of [43], the authors have
classified the relevant studies for cold-start user problem
into three groups: 1) makes use of additional data sources;
2) selects the most prominent groups of analogous users; 3)
enhances the prediction using hybrid methods. A limitation
of first group is that we need some additional data sources
(tags, demographical information, etc). If these are not
1 https://www.netflixprize.com
A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi
available, it fails to address the problem. In the case of
second group, we have to use brute force algorithm to find
the optimal number of groups, so, it is not convenient. In the
third group, i.e., hybrid, it is too expensive for computation
of similarities.
For handling sparsity problem of CF, several researchers
have provided their solutions by using additional feedbacks
with in-domain such as likes/dislikes [15, 16, 18], users
reviews [17], history records [18], etc. and tried to mitigate
the sparsity problem. In two literature papers [20, 44],
several authors have focused one or more than one domains
and proposed their methods to leveraging the knowledge
from multiple source domains in order to increase the
performance of target prediction by transfer learning [23].
This type of strategy is called Cross-domain Recommender
Systems (CDRSs).
Cremonesi, et al. [24] have classified three types of
category based on the overlapping of users/items in CDRSs:
fully users/items overlap, partially users/items overlap and
non-overlap users and items. In the case of fully or
partially users/items overlap, a first paper presented by
[45] in 2008. Similarly, [46] have proposed the method
for CDRSs using aggregating user rating vectors from
different domains and apply traditional memory-based CF.
Hu, et al. [47] has proposed the method for cross-domain
version of a matrix factorization, in which an augmented
user-item rating matrix is constructed by horizontally
concatenating all matrices. These type of methods are used
multi-task transfer learning where both domains are used
simultaneously. Cremonesi, et al. [24] considered to model
(partially overlap users and/or items) the classical similarity
relationships as a direct graph and explore all possible paths
connecting users or items in order to find new cross-domain
relationships. However, all the above mentioned methods
consider overlapping users or items across domains for
knowledge transfer which are not a realistic setting because
finding same user or item in two distinct domains is too
difficult.
In the third category, i.e., non-overlap users and items,
[19] have proposed the method name as Codebook Transfer
(CBT) based on cluster-level rating pattern for knowledge
transfer between domains. CBT is fully based on rating
pattern, extract the rating pattern from source domain by
using the two-way k-mean algorithm, and then transfer
it to the target domain. The authors have assumed that
two different domains have similar rating pattern. But in a
practical scenario, every domain has its rating distribution,
we can not assume to be same. Rather focusing on
rating pattern transfer, several researchers [25–28] have
also focused on non-overlap users/items category by using
additional tag information, and assume that tags overlap
in both domains. The limitation of tag-based transfer
learning methods in CDRSs is to finding overlap tag
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...

between domains which is too expensive. Table 1 shows After calculating similarity, prediction is made by a
the classification of methods based on types of knowledge weighted average strategy as follows:
exploitation from either additional feedbacks (in-domain) or topK
additional other related domains. sim a,u (ru,i − r̄u )
r̂a,i = r̄a + 
u=1  (2)
 topK 
 u=1 sim a,u 
3.1 Related work
where a, u ∈ M, i ∈ N , sim a,u represents similarity
Various techniques of recommendation systems have been
between user a and u, Iu,a is co-rated items between user
developed in single-domain as well as cross-domain
u and a. topK means set of most k-neighbors users that are
recommender systems. This paper focuses an efficient
most similar to user a. r̄a and r̄u are mean rating of user a
cross-domain based recommendations using user profile
and u for all rated items, respectively.
which acts as a bridge for knowledge transfer from a source
Due to the behavior of available datasets are sparse, so
domain. According to literature studied, no one used user
calculate the similarity from every user is not good idea.
profile in CDRSs framework. In this section, we summarize
Another solution, User Preference Clustering (UPC-CF) has
the works that are most representative and relevant to the
been proposed by [7]. UPC-CF is based on user preference
study.
clustering to reduce the impact of data sparsity. The Authors
The existing work can be classified into two categories:
have used three clusters as Co, Cp and Cn represent
without transfer and with transfer. In the former category,
optimistic user group, pessimistic user group, and neutral
researchers [5, 8, 12] have focused only a single specific
user group respectively. An intuition of UPC-CF method is
domain, i.e., no transfer learning is applied. So, collabora-
that users could have starkly different views on an item. The
tive filtering is one of the best state-of-the-art techniques. As
Clustering has been done based a mean rating of a user with
mentioned earlier, two types of CF are memory-based and
threshold values, for instance, threshold values are (based
model-based. One of the traditional methods in memory-
on numerical rating range 1 − 5): {{1, 2, 3} , {4, 5} , {3}} for
based is kNN-CF where topK neighbors are found based
pessimistic user group, optimistic user group and neutral
on similarities between an active user and other users. A
user group, respectively. If user u mean rating is 4.12,
similarity can be calculated by Pearson correlation formula
then the user u belongs in optimistic user group. After
[40] as:
 categorized all users based on their mean rating, the cluster
i∈Ia,u (ra,i − r̄a )(ru,i − r̄u ) center of all three clusters is calculated as:
sim a,u =   (1)
i∈Ia,u (ra,i − r̄a ) i∈Ia,u (ru,i − r̄u )
2 2
C∗ = u ⇐ max |Iu | (3)

Table 1 Classification of methods based on types of knowledge exploitation from either additional feedbacks (in-domain) or additional other
related domains

Research paper Additional domains based on the overlap of users and items Additional data

fully users/items partial users/items non-overlap users and items

Winoto and Tang [45], 2008 

Li et al. [19], 2009 ∗ (Rating pattern)
Pan et al. [48], 2010 
Cremonesi et al. [24], 2011 
Shi et al. [25], 2011  (Tags)
Pan and Yang [15], 2013 
Enrich et al. [26], 2013  (Tags)
Hu et al. [47], 2013 
Fernández-Tobı́ [27], 2014  (Tags)
Xin et al. [17], 2015 
Fang et al. [49], 2016  (Tags)
Zhao et al. [50], 2017 
Zhu et al. [21], 2017 
Sahu et al. [28], 2018  (Tags)
Yu et al. [32], 2018 
 A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi

cluster center is that user who has provided maximum After removing the biases, latent factor matrix U and
number of ratings in specific cluster of users. After calculate V can be estimated using user-item rating matrix. The loss
the cluster center of all three clusters, a preference of an function in MF as follows:
active user is identify by using modified similarity equation 1 
 2
 λu λv
as: min I  Y − U V T  + U 2f + U 2f (6)
U,V 2 f 2 2


i∈Ia,u (ra,i − ru,i ) ∗ |r̄a − r̄u |
sim U PC
= ex p −  
a,u  Ia,b 
|Ia | ∩ |Iu |
∗ (4)
|Ia | ∪ |Iu |
Prediction can be calculate from (2) by replacing the
similarity formula. An advantage of UPC-CF is that it does
not require to calculate similarities from all users.
Another paper in same direction has been proposed by
[12] with different strategies to find topK neighbors. The
authors have proposed a modified version of memory-
based CF name as Neighbor Users by Subspace Clustering
(NUSC-CF). The authors have tried to find users in the
corresponding subspaces of items. An intubation is that
users grouped under the same cluster share similar interests.
These subspaces are then used to find a tree of neighbor
users. The amount of similarity of every user to the target
user determines his position on the tree. A disadvantage
of NUSC-CF is that number of subspaces may grow
exponentially, and it depends on total number of items in
dataset.
In case of model-based approach, MF, as mentioned ear-
lier, tries to describe users’ taste and items’ information in
small number of latent factors or space. These latent factors
can be estimated through learning mechanism [29] by using
previous historical records. After estimating both latent
factor matrices, the prediction can be made using corre-
sponding their inner product of user and item latent
factors.
In traditional MF, rather directly apply learning algorithm
to estimate latent factors of users and items, firstly we
remove user and item biases from rating for more critical
user (who rates more critically than others) and highly
popular item bias for estimating the values more precisely.
U s 11T V s (8)
This type of method is baseline or Average Filling with bias
(AF with bias) method [51] of MF. The user and item biases
means entry-wise division. Equation 8 shows
are estimated as:
m 
n pattern. U s , U t , V s , V t ∈ {0, 1} represent cluster indicator
min Iu,i
bu ,bi
where x f is Frobenius norm and yu,i ∈ Y = ru.i − bu −
bi − μ
In later category, i.e., with transfer, CBT is one of the
state-of-the art techniques where transfer learning is used.
An advantage of CBT is that it does not require overlap users
as well as items from a source domain. Most of memory
based CF methods based on similarity that are estimated
through co-rated items between users. If co-rated items may
not enough amount similarity value may not be accurate,
therefore some researchers [5] have provided their solutions
by filling unknown ratings through corresponding mean
value of provided known ratings. But, it is not good idea.
So, [19] have proposed codebook transfer approach wherein
ratings fill through compact codebook which are extract
from other related source domain. After filling unknown
ratings, traditional kNN-CF is applied. CBT has two phases:
extraction of codebook and expansion of codebook.
Figure 4 shows an example of CBT approach wherein
two rating matrices have used for source and target domain.
In extraction phase, rating matrix of source domain is
permuted through 2-way k-mean clustering [52] and then
extract compact user-item rating pattern called codebook. In
second phase, extracted codebook is expended into a target
domain. Fill missing rating entries are shown in Fig. 4 with
’*’ symbol in the target domain.
The objective function of CBT as:
  
 s sT 
min I  R s
− U s
BV  (7)
U ,B,V
s s f
T T
s.t. U s U s = I , V s V s = I
After minimizing the (7), construction of codebook as
follows:
   
B = U s R s V s
where
averaging all the ratings in each user-item co-cluster as
an entry in the codebook, i.e., the cluster-level rating
matrices. After extraction phase of CBT from a source

u=1 i=1

domain, same procedure is applied in reverse order for
1 λb λb transferring CBT in the target domain and then apply
 (ru,i − μ − bu − bi )2 + u bu2 + i bi2 (5)
2 2 2 traditional kNN-CF method for prediction. The limitation
of CBT is sharing same cluster-level rating pattern which
where bu bi and μ are user bias, item bias and average rating is not realistic in practical scenario because distribution of
of all available ratings in dataset, respectively. λbu and λbi ratings in distinct domains may not be same cluster-level
are regularization parameters to control over-fitting. rating patten.
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...
Fig. 4 An example of CBT
method using transfer learning
Table 2 shows summarization of related works. In previ-
ous related works, modifications and enhancements of col-
laborative filtering are mainly embodied in three scenarios:
the similarity measure followed by topK neighbor selection
[3, 6, 7], latent factor model [9, 14] and transfer knowl-
edge [19] from other domain. All related work methods have
been tried to mitigate the sparsity problem of CF with some
assumptions. Although the researchers have tried to address
sparsity problem, it is a challenging and open problem of
RSs.
This paper falls in two types of scenario: transfer
knowledge and latent factor model. In this paper, we
propose a novel method for CF to mitigate sparsity problem
and enhance the performance of rating prediction using
other related domain by transfer learning strategy in CDRSs
framework. As we mentioned earlier, leveraging knowledge
from other related domains, we need some overlapping
information between domains. Here, we use user profile
as a bridge even no users/items overlap between domains.
Another aspect is latent factor model, i.e., how to learn
hidden factors of user and item. So, we use probabilistic
matrix factorization model which helps to learn hidden
factor efficiently. Several authors have focused on any first
two types scenario, i.e., neighbors selection and latent factor
model. We can differentiate our method and related work
methods by combine last two scenarios (latent factor model
and transfer learning).
4 Proposed UP-CDRSs method
In this section, we describe our proposed UP-CDRSs
method which consists four fold: 1) Build user profile in
both domains 2) Calculate similarity between users profile
of distinct domains 3) Merge both domains into a single set
and build probabilistic model to find relationship between
variables, and then solve it by probabilistic theory to get
objective function. The objective function is solved by
alternating least square approach 4) In last fold, predictions
on unrated items’ rating in the target domain are made.
Figure 5 shows the architecture of UP-CDRSs method.
4.1 Build user profile
Firstly, we build a user profile using demographical
information of a user, explicit ratings (provided by a user)
and content information of user-rated items. Block diagram
of building a user profile is shown in Fig. 6. We capture
user’s preferences (in form of vector) using explicit ratings
and content information of rated items of a user. After
that, we augment demographical information with user’s
preferences’ vector. Figure 7 shows a user profile vector.
User’s preferences: The benefit of capturing user’s pref-
erences is that we can be able to know the content
preferences of a user. For capturing user’s preferences,
 A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi

Table 2 Summarization of previous approaches

Research Is transfer learning Approach Remark

papers applied

Candillier et al. [3], 2007 No kNN-CF, Find topK neighbors – Similarity calculation is too expensive
using Pearson correlation coeffi- – Problem of data scalability
cients and apply weighted aver-
age of corresponding similarity
and rating of other co-rated user
Salakhutdinov and Mnih [14], 2007 No cPMF, Use a concept of hidden – Handle the problem of data scalability
latent factors and represent a user – Handle semi cold-start user problem,
and an item in small number of i.e., who has not provided enough ratings
hidden factors
Koren et al. [9], 2009 No MF, Use a concept of hidden – Handle the problem of data scalability
latent factors and represent a user – Handle the problem of critical users
and an item in small number of and items by removing the bias from the
hidden factors ratings
Li et al. [19], 2009 Yes CBT, Find cluster-level rating – Handle the problem of data sparsity
pattern from a source domain and – Too expensive to find compact rating
then transfer to the target domain pattern
followed by kNN-CF method
Zhang et al. [7], 2016 No UPC-CF, Clustering has been – Mitigate the problem of similarity
used for finding similar user calculation to all other users in the dataset
groups. Three clusters represent – It may not work well in huge dataset
optimistic user group, pessimistic
user group and neutral user
group, and followed by modified
modified kNN method
Koohi et al. [6], 2017 No NUSC-FC, Find the users in – Find subspace is too expensive
the corresponding subspaces of
items. These subspaces are then
used to find a tree of neighbor
users. The amount of similarity
of every user to the target user
determines his position on the
tree.

we use two formule: Relative Genre Ratings (RG R) and rated (r >= 3) items of genre G g corresponding to
Modified Relative Genre Frequency (M RG F) [53]. In the user u is computed.
this paper, we use genre information as content informa- MRGF: Rather focusing on items rating, frequency of
tion because we focus on movie recommendations. After genres preferred by a user also an important concern,
calculating both values, a particular user’s preference can the ratio of user u ratings (respect to frequency) for
be calculated by harmonic mean of both values. Formule high rated items on each genre of total ratings (respect
of RGR and MRGF as follows: to frequency).
MGRF(u, g)
RGR: The ratio of user u for high rated items on each 
genre of total ratings on items. s∈G g ⊂Si δ3 (ru,s )+2 ∗ δ4 (ru,s )+3 ∗ δ5 (ru,s )
= (10)
3 ∗ T F(u)
G R(u, g) 
RG R(u, g) = (9) GF(u, g) = s∈G g ⊂Si δk (ri,s )
T R(u)
s.t.  k ∈ 3, 4, 5 
 , and TF(u) = |Si |
TR(u) = ru,s , and 1 k =ri,s
δk (ri,s ) =
s∈Su 0 dk  = ri,s

GR(u, g) = ru,s where Si is total number of ratings given by the user u.
s∈G g ⊂Su ,r ≥3
2∗nf ∗RGR(u, g)∗MRGF(u, g)
user’s preference(u, g) =
Here, T R is total ratings of user u, S is set of items RGR(u, g)+MRGF(u, g)
rated by user u and the genre rating (G R) for high (11)
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...
Fig. 5 Architecture of
UP-CDRSs method
where n f is a normalization factor. User’s prefer-
ence(u,g) means the user u how much likely to prefer the
genre g. Similarly, we calculate all preferences of user u
according to corresponding genres in given dataset.
Demographical information: While a user register on
the system, he/she provides some personal information,
Fig. 6 Block diagram of building the user profile
such as age, gender, country name, occupation, etc.
These types of information or data called demographic
information or demographical information.
In this paper, we use only age and gender as demo-
graphical information of a user. Each user’s age belongs
a particular group ranges < 1 − 17, 18 − 24, 25 −
34, 34 − 44, 45 − 49, 50 − 55, 56+ >. This
information can be encoded as in binary value, for
instance, user u age is 43, so binary encoded form is
< 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0 > Other demographical information
is gender, where only two options are provided, i.e., ’M’
and ’F’ for male and female, respectively.
After capturing user’s preferences and extracting demo-
graphical information, we concatenate into a single vector
called user profile (refer Fig. 7).
For better understanding, we consider an example of
movie recommender systems (shown in Table 3). There are
three users u 1 , u 2 and u 3 and ten movies i 1 , i 2 , · · · i 10 .
Explicit ratings are expressed with numerical values from 1
to 5. Unrated ratings are shown as ’?’. Here, genre descrip-
tion as content information is considered. Five genres are
 A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi

Fig. 7 Illustration of a user

profile vector

given in the form of < g1 , g2 , g3 , g4 , g5 >. If genre gi
presents on the movie denoted as 1 otherwise 0.
Firstly, we calculate RG R and M RG F values of all users
on each genre using (9) and (10), respectively. Tables 4 and
5 show RG R and M RG F values, respectively.
After calculating both values, users’ preferences can be
calculated using (11). Table 6 shows users’ preferences.
The value of n f = 0.8 is used. We can observe from
Table 6 is that the user u 1 prefers (g3 = .9030) genre
comparatively, similarly the user u 3 prefers (g5 = .9274)
genre comparatively.
After calculating users’ preferences, we extract demo-
graphical information. In Fig. 3, age and gender of users are
described. We consider seven groups of ages < a1 , a2 , a3 ,
a4 , a5 , a6 , a7 >. Ranges of group are < 1 − 17, 18 −
24, 25 − 34, 34 − 44, 45 − 49, 50 − 55, 56+ >. Each
user’s age belongs a particular group, for instance, If a user
u age is 39 than encoded vector is < 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0 >.
Other demographical information is gender, so only two
options are there, i.e., ’M’ and ’F’ for male and female,
respectively. Here, we use only scalar value in binary form
(1 and 0). Combine both information into a single vector,
so size of vector is eight. for instance, u 1 .age = 18 and
u 1 .gender = M  so demographic information in vector
form is < 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 >.
After calculating both information, again we concate-
nate into single vector called user profile (Pik ) vector. for
instance, user’s preferences vector of user u 1 is < 0.4528, 0,
0.9030, 0.444, 0 >, and demographic information in vector
Table 3 An Example of movie domain rating matrix
u1 u2 u3
form is< 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 >. Thereafter concatenate
both vectors into a single one, i.e., < 0.4528, 0, 0.9030,
0.444, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 >.
4.2 Similarity calculation between users profile
In the second fold, we calculate similarity S  between
Pis ,Pit
all users profile of domain and Pis Pit
from domain s and
t, respectively. Similarity is calculated using cosine formula
as follows:
P s .P t
S s t  =  s i  i t  (12)
Pi ,Pi  P  P 
i i
4.3 Probabilistic graphical model of UP-CDRSs
method
Figure 8 shows the probabilistic graphical model [29, 54],
where each node represents a random variable, and links
express probabilistic relationships between these variables.
Random variables in our proposed method are Uik , V jk , Ri, j
and S s t  for user latent factors, item latent factors, rat-
Pi ,Pi 
ings and similarity between users profile, respectively. How
to variables are related among them are shown in Fig. 8.
According to graphical model theory, the joint distribution
of all variables expressed as:
p(U s , V s , U t , V t , R s , R t , S, σU s , σV s , σU t , σV t , σs , σt , σ p ) =
p(R s |U s , V s , σs ) p(R t |U t , V t , σt ) p(S|U s , U t , σ p ) p(U s |σU s )
p(V s |σV s ) p(U t |σU t ) p(V t |σV t ) p(S|σ p )
P(σU s )P(σV s )P(σU t )P(σV t )P(σs )P(σt )P(σ p )
(13)

i 1<1,0,1,0,0> 5 ? ? Neglecting the constant prior probability of equation (13).

i 2<0,0,1,1,0> ? 3 2 The log-posterior probability over the latent variables is:
i 3<1,0,1,0,0> 4 ? ?
i 4<0,1,0,0,1> ? 4 5 Table 4 RGR values of an example
i 5<0,0,1,1,0> 3 ? ?
User # TR G Rr>=3 RG R
i 6<1,0,0,0,1> 2 5 4
i 7<0,0,1,1,0> 4 ? ? u1 21 < 9, 0, 19, 10, 0 > < 0.4286, 0, 0.9048, 0.4762, 0 >
i 8<0,1,1,0,1> ? 5 4 u2 23 < 5, 13, 8, 3, 18 > < 0.2174, 0.5652, 0.3478, 0.1304,
i 9<0,1,0,0,1> ? 4 ? 0.7826 >
i 10<0,0,1,1,0> 3 2 ? u3 15 < 4, 9, 4, 0, 13 > < 0.2667, 0.6000, 0.2667, 0, 0.8667 >
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...

log p(U s , V s , U t , V t |R s , R t , S, σU s , σV s , σU t , σV t , σs , σt , σt , σ p ) ∝
log[ p(R s |U s , V s , σs ) p(R t |U t , V t , σt ) p(S|U s , U t , σ p )
p(U s |σU s ) p(V s |σV s ) p(U t |σU t ) p(V t |σV t ) p(S|σ p )] (14)

The conditional distribution over the observed ratings as: where N (x | μ, σk ) denotes the probability density function
for a Gaussian distribution with mean μ and variance σk .
 N 
M  k k
I k
T i, j The zero-mean spherical Gaussian prior on users an items
p(R | U , V , σk ) =
k k k
N (Ri,k j | Uik V jk , σk )
vectors as:
i=1 j=1
k
(15) 
M
p(U k | σU k ) = N (Uik | 0, σU k ) , (17)
where Ii,k j is binary mask. If user i rated movie j in domain
i=1
k is equal to 1 otherwise 0. The conditional distribution over k
the users profile similarities as: 
N
p(V | σV k ) =
k
N (V jk | 0, σV k )

Ms Mt
T
 j=1
p(S | U s , U t , σ p ) = N (S  | Uis Uit , σ p )
Pis ,Pit
i=1 i  =1 Substitute the (15), (17) and (16) into (14) for k ∈ {s, t},
(16) we get:

log p(U s , V s , U t , V t |R s , R t , S, σU s , σV s , σU t , σV t , σs , σt , σt , σ p ) =
⎡ s s

M  N  I s  Mt Nt  I t
log ⎣ s sT
N (Ri, j | Ui V j , σs )
s i, j T
N (Ri,t j | Uit V jt , σt )
i, j

i=1 j=1 i=1 j=1

Ms 
 Mt  
Ms
T
N (S  | Uis Uit , σ p ) N (Uis | 0, σU s )
Pis ,Pit
i=1 i  =1 i=1
⎤
Ns
 Mt
 Nt

p(V k | σV s ) N (V js | 0, σV s ) N (Uit | 0, σU t ) p(V t | σV t ) N (V jt | 0, σV t ) + C ⎦ (18)
j=1 i=1 j=1

where C is term containing users profile variance, ratings depend on the parameters. Applying the product rule of
variance and prior variance. A constant term C does not (18). we get:

s s t t
1  s 1  t
M N M N
s sT 2 T
− I i, j (R s
i, j − U V
i j ) − Ii, j (Ri,t j − Uit V jt )2
2σs2 2σ 2
t i=1 j=1
i=1 j=1
M M  s t 2 s s
1   1  s sT 1  s sT
M N
T
− 2 S s t  − Uis Uit − U U
i i − Vj Vj
2σ p Pi ,Pi  2σu2s i=1 2σv2s j=1
i=1 i  =1
t t
1  t tT 1  t tT
M N
− 2 Ui Ui − Vj Vj + C (19)
2σu t i=1 2σv2t j=1

Table 5 MRGF values of an

example TF GF δ3 GF δ4 GF δ5 MRGF

u1 6 < 0, 0, 2, 2, 0 > < 1, 0, 2, 1, 0 > < 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 > < 0.8333, 0, 1.5000, 0.6667, 0 >
u2 6 < 0, 0, 1, 1, 0 > < 0, 2, 0, 0, 2 > < 1, 1, 1, 0, 2 > < 0.5, 1.1667, 0.6667, 0.1667, 1.6667 >
u3 4 < 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 > < 1, 1, 1, 0, 2 > < 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 > < 0.5000, 1.2500, 0.5000, 0, 1.7500 >
 A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi

Table 6 An example of user’s preferences where λs , λt , are constant trade-off parameters to avoid
over-fitting by penalizing the magnitudes of the parameters.
User # Users’ preferences
α also is constant trade-off parameter to control the
u1 < 0.4528, 0, 0.9030, 0.4444, 0 > influence of users profile similarity.
u2 < 0.2424, 0.6092, 0.3657, 0.1171, 0.8521 > To minimize an error (E) of the objective function (20),
u3 < 0.2783, 0.6486, 0.2783, 0, 0.9274 > we have used alternating least square approach [51] to learn
all the parameters.
Ns
We assume that all have a equal variance, i.e., σs2 = σt2 = 1 s T
Let E(Uis ) = Ii, j (Ri,s j − Uis V js )2
σ p = σu2s = σv2s = σu2t = σv2t . Therefore, the objective
2
2
j=1
function E as: ⎛ s ⎞
Ns
λs ⎝  s s T  s s T ⎠
M
Ms N s
1  s T + Ui Ui + Vj Vj
E(U , V , U , V ) =
s s t t
Ii, j (Ri,s j − Uis V js )2 2
2 i=1 j=1
i=1 j=1
⎛ s ⎞ Mt 
Ms 
 2
Ns α
λs ⎝  s s T  s s T ⎠
M T
+ S  − Uis Uit
+ Ui Ui + Vj Vj 2 Pis ,Pit
2 i=1 i  =1
i=1 j=1
Mt Nt partial derivative:
1  t T
+ Ii, j (Ri,t j − Uit .V jt )2 Ns
2 ∂E  T
i=1 j=1
⎛ t ⎞ = − Ii,s j (Ri,s j − Uis V js )V js
Nt
∂Uis
λt ⎝ t t T  t t T ⎠
M j=1
+ Ui Ui + Vj Vj Mt  
2 α   s tT
i=1 j=1 − S s t − Ui Ui  Ui  + λs Uis
2  Pi ,Pi 
M M 
s t 2
α    s tT
i =1
+ S s t − Ui Ui 
2 
Pi ,Pi  Similarly, in target domain E(Uit ) of user i,
i=1 i =1
(20) Nt
∂E  T
= − Ii,t j (Ri,t j − Uit V jt )V jt
∂Uit
j=1
Ms  
α  T
− S s t  − Uis Uit Uis + λt Uit
2 Pi ,Pi 
i=1

Item latent factor in source and target domains can be

optimized as follows:

 Ms
∂E T
= − Ii,s j (Ri,s j − Uis V js )Uis + λs V js
∂Vj
s
i=1

 Mt
∂E T
=− Ii,t j (Ri,t j − Uit Vtt )Uit + λt V jt
∂Vj
t
i=1

∂E ∂E ∂E ∂E
So, ∂Uis
= ∂Uis
= ∂ V js
= ∂ V jt
=0
After calculating the gradient of all four parameters,
update the values as follows:
∂E
θ ←θ −γ ∗ (21)
∂θ
where γ is a learning! rate of the objective function E, and
θ ∈ Us, V s, Ut, V t .
This process iteratively repeat until to convergence of
Fig. 8 Probabilistic graphical model of UP-CDRSs method local optimal state.
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...

4.4 Prediction datasets belong movie recommender systems, so, there is

a case wherein same movies may overlap. Figure 9 shows
After learning all four parameters (θ ) of the objective cross-domain structure of both datasets. For considering non
function E, predict the unknown ratings in the target domain overlap scenarios, we have to remove overlapping movies in
can be computed as: one of the datasets. Some preprocessing steps as follows:
T
R̂i, j = Uit V jt (22) – Firstly, we find overlap movies in both datasets through
movies name. In this process, 1,361 movies are found
which belong to both datasets. These overlapped
movies are discarded in one of the datasets. In our
5 Experiments and results
scenario, we chose ML and discarded 1,361 overlapped
movies. Remaining 2,591 movies are considered in
In this section, firstly we describe datasets that are used
ML (domain 1). After that, the rating matrix, in triplet
in this paper followed by data preprocessing. After that
form (userID, itemID, rating), is refined and we only
we describe experiment protocols and evaluation metrics.
considered 589,395 out of 1,000,209 ratings.
At last, we discuss compared methods and summary of
– In EM dataset (domain 2), we consider equal number of
experimental results.
users as domain 1. In this case, 6,040 users are chosen
randomly with constraint that users must provide
5.1 Datasets
demographical information. After that, rating matrix is
refined, and only 284,886 out of 2,811,983 rating is
We have used two datasets which are publicly available
considered .
and also benchmark datasets for RSs: MovieLens2 and
– Building a user profile, genres information and
EachMovie 3 . Both datasets are similar in terms of recom-
demographical information are used. In case of genre
mendations because both are used for movie recommender
information, only 7 genres overlap, name as ’Action’
systems. The brief overview of datasets are following:
as ’Act’, ’Animation’ as ’Ani’, ’Comedy’ as ’Com’,
– A MovieLens (ML) rating dataset contains 1,000,209 ’Drama’ as ’Dra’, ’Horror’ as ’Hor’, ’Romance’ as
ratings of 3,952 movies rated by 6,040 users. Rating is ’Rom’ and ’Thriller’ as ’Thr’ between domains.
made on a 5-star scale i.e., 1 − 5. Other information – An intersecting thing is that one more hidden overlap
about users and items are demographical information genre present between domains. Finding a hidden
(gender, age, occupation and zip code) and genre overlap genre, we use cosine similarity between genres
information, respectively. The presence of user’s age is as follows:
in form of seven group ranges, i.e., 1−17, 18−24, 25−
∗ As mentioned earlier, 1,361 movies are same
34, 35 − 44, 45 − 50, 51 − 55, 56+, and the presence
in both domains. The intuition is that If two
user’s gender in form of ’M’/’F’. Each movie measures
movies have same name in distinct domains
in binary combination of eighteen genres.
than the presence of genres in a movie also
– In EachMovie (EM) dataset contains 2,811,983 ratings
be a same. Here, we have calculated Jaccard
of 1,628 movies given by 72,916 users. Rating score
is given in six ranges < 0, 0.2, .04, 0.6, 0.8, 1 >.
Other details of users and items are demographical
information (gender, age and zip code) and genre
information, respectively. The presence of user’s age
is in numerical value, and the presence user’s gender
in form of ’M’/’F’. Each movie measures in binary
combination of ten genres.

5.2 Data preprocessing

This paper uses the transfer learning mechanism to exploit

the knowledge of source domain wherein the constraint non-
overlap users and items between domains. Both mentioned

2 https://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/10m/
3 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/?lebanon/IR-lab.htm
Fig. 9 Cross-domain structure of MovieLens and EachMovie datasets
 A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi

similarity between genres based on overlapped
1361 items. Similarity is calculated as:
|A ∩ B|
jaccar d sim(g1 , g2 ) =
|A ∪ B|
∗ Seven genres name are same in both domain,
we have also calculated the highest similarity
with same name of the genre. In Table 7,
boldface values (e.g., 0.6130) show that
the highest similarities between the genres
in two distinct domains. ’chi’(children) and
’fam’(family) same type of genre because
we calculated high similarity ( italic-boldface
0.6884) Although ’chi’ and ’fam’ genres name
are different, both genres meaning are same.
We consider ’chi’ and ’fam’ same genre. So,
total eight genres overlap between domains.
– In ML dataset, 7 bins (hard encoded) are used for age
information and gender information is provided in form
of ”M” and ”F”,so, only needs scalar value (0/1). In case
of EM dataset, age is provided in form of numerical
number. Due to consistency between datasets, we have
applied numeric ranges filter and transformed in seven
bins same as in ML.
– Finally, a user profile (P∗k ) vector size is 8+7+1=16
(refer Fig. 7), i.e., number of genres are 8, age ranges
group are 7 and gender in scalar form.
– For rating-scale consistency, we have replaced the
rating values from {0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1} to {1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 5} same as [19] have done in CBT method.
(23) Table 8 shows the overall datasets description after the
preprocessing steps. We observe that sparsity level of ML is
lesser than sparsity level of EM. To validate the effective-
ness of transfer learning mechanism, we consider ML and
EM as source domain and target domain, respectively.
5.3 Experiment protocols
Furthermore, validating the effectiveness of a proposed UP-
CDRSs method in CDRSs model, experiments are done on
various sparsity levels of the target domain. In this manner,
The target domain’s ratings are divided based on number of
rated ratings of each user {1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5%, 2.9%}, for
instance, 6,040 users and 1,628 items in a domain. If we take
1% of ratings of each user than total number of ratings are (
.01 ∗ 6, 040 ∗ 1, 628 ≈ 98, 331). So, total five experiments
are done on the basis of number of known ratings.
We have adopted 10-fold cross-validation process, where
rating of the target domain is divided into 10 equal parts.
9 parts are used for training purpose and a remain part
for testing purpose. After that training part of the target
domain is concatenated with a source domain. Same process
is applied ten times on each test part. After evaluating each
part, mean value of all parts shows an overall performance
of the method. We have also used 95% confidence interval

Table 7 Similarities between genres

Act Ani Art Cla Com Dra Fam Hor Rom Thr

Act 0.6130 0.0130 0.0222 0.0295 0.0506 0.0579 0.0256 0.0420 0.0063 0.1551
Adv 0.2385 0.0464 0.0138 0.0767 0.0210 0.0291 0.1942 0.0154 0.0083 0.0701
Ani 0.0000 0.8333 0.0095 0.0364 0.0075 0.0000 0.2222 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
Chi 0.0143 0.2832 0.0108 0.0764 0.0465 0.0034 0.6884 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
Com 0.0274 0.0221 0.0641 0.0946 0.6255 0.0647 0.1000 0.0141 0.1232 0.0171
Cri 0.1034 0.0000 0.0079 0.0508 0.0300 0.0747 0.0049 0.0533 0.0000 0.1013
Doc 0.0044 0.0000 0.0419 0.0000 0.0122 0.0684 0.0057 0.0079 0.0000 0.0000
Dra 0.0440 0.0016 0.1828 0.0950 0.0921 0.5157 0.0350 0.0169 0.0946 0.0681
Fan 0.0103 0.0545 0.0157 0.0048 0.0158 0.0040 0.0896 0.0103 0.0000 0.0000
FNo 0.0211 0.0000 0.0000 0.0615 0.0000 0.0020 0.0000 0.0105 0.0000 0.0444
Hor 0.0122 0.0091 0.0041 0.0397 0.0186 0.0036 0.0000 0.6237 0.0000 0.1198
Mus 0.0044 0.2222 0.0182 0.1014 0.0272 0.0095 0.1282 0.0000 0.0298 0.0000
Mys 0.0326 0.0000 0.0185 0.0780 0.0073 0.0253 0.0000 0.0081 0.0120 0.1134
Rom 0.0462 0.0082 0.0850 0.0815 0.1364 0.1201 0.0182 0.0070 0.3891 0.0216
Sci-fi 0.1713 0.0268 0.0203 0.0391 0.0255 0.0239 0.0100 0.0690 0.0050 0.1027
Thr 0.2078 0.0086 0.0278 0.0724 0.0181 0.0611 0.0031 0.0916 0.0063 0.4818
War 0.0396 0.0000 0.0446 0.0779 0.0240 0.0650 0.0000 0.0000 0.0339 0.0177
Wes 0.0361 0.0000 0.0000 0.0288 0.0156 0.0264 0.0067 0.0000 0.0137 0.0104
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...

Table 8 Datasets description after preprocessing Here , we have used λbi = λb j = .001 as trade-off
parameters to avoid the over-fitting problem.
ML EM
Collaborative filtering with topK neighbors (kNN-CF)
# of users 6,040 6,040 is one of the most traditional techniques of RSs. We have
# of items 2,591 1,628 fixed the value of topK= 50. Two variants of kNN-CF are
# of ratings 589,395 284,886 UPC-CF and NUSC-CF. A first method uses clustering
Sparsity level 96.27% 97.10% to find similar users group after that selection process of
# genres 8 8 topK neighbors. So, we have fixed the value of topK= 50
same as kNN-CF. The second method uses sub-spacing
concept, so we have fixed the value of d = 5. d denotes
while calculating an average value of all test sets. Finding dimensionality [6]. Another compared method is MF [9]
the best trade-off parameters, 20% of the training data is which provides the lower rank approximations of the user-
used as a validation set. item matrix. The prediction can be done using an inner
product of corresponding two vectors of user and item. The
5.4 Evaluation metrics prediction is estimated as follows:

Evaluating of our proposed work, we have used Mean T

R̂i, j = Uit V jt + bi, j (28)
Absolute Error (M AE) and Root Mean Square Error
(R M S E) as the evaluation metrics which are defined as: where Ui , V j ∈ R1× f and bi, j = μ + bi + b j . We have used
  
  λu = λv = .001 as trade-off parameters, and size of latent
(i, j)∈RT Ri, j − R̂i, j 
M AE = (24) factors f = 10 is fixed. Similarly, constraint Probabilistic
|RT | Matrix Factorization (cPMF) extended version of proba-
"
#  2 bilistic matrix factorization (PMF) [14]. Rather learn two
#
$ (u,i)∈rT ru,i − r̂u,i latent vectors, one for user and other for item, add an addi-
RMSE = (25) tional constrain user-specific feature vectors for infrequent
|r T |
users. The prediction can be estimated as:
where RT denotes the total number of predicted ratings in
the target domain. Ri, j denotes the actual rating and R̂i, j ⎛ Mt % ⎞
t
j=1 Ii, j Wj
predicted rating on item i to user u. R̂i, j = ⎝Uit + Mt ⎠ V jt T (29)
t
j=1 Ii, j
5.5 Compared methods and parameters setting
where W j is ∈ R1× f additional vector of latent factors. In
In this subsection, we describe compared methods which this method, first we scale the ratings to the interval [0,1]
are used for comparisons of our proposed UP-CDRSs using the function f (x) = x−1k−1 . k is maximum rating value
method. This subsection also covers parameters setting of given matrix. The trade-off parameter values are λu =
because applying any methods for validation, we need some λv = λw = .002 and size of latent factor f = 30 is fixed.
threshold values, learning parameter values, etc. Compare with transfer learning mechanism in RSs,
Average filling (AF) method takes very less time to Codebook transfer knowledge (CBT) method [19] has been
predict the ratings. In a user-item rating matrix, we just fill proposed for knowledge transfer between domains through
the mean value of all observed items’ rating provided by a codebook. The clusters size of CBT is set to be 50. And
user. The prediction as follows: topK nearest neighbors K = 30 is fixed for Pearson
Mt t % t correlation coefficients. In case of our proposed UP-CDRSs
j=1 Ii, j Ri, j
R̂i,∗ = Mt t (26) method, The trade-off parameter values are λs = λt = .002,
j=1 Ii, j α = .001, and size of latent factors f = 30 is fixed.
%
where symbol is element wise product. Another method
in same manner is Average filling with bais (AF with bias), 5.6 Summary of the experimental results
i.e., rather blinding fill mean value of the ratings, learn user
bias and item bias using observed ratings for critical users All state-of-the-art methods, described in the aforemen-
and items, and predict the ratings as follows [9]: tioned subsection, and our proposed work are experimented
on publicly available datasets. In addition, validating and
R̂i, j = μ + bi + b j (27) analysing of our UP-CDRSs methods by transfer learning
where μ is a global mean value of the user-item rating mechanism, target domain’s ratings are divided based on the
matrix, bi and b j are user bias and item bias, respectively. number of rated ratings of each user. Analyse the perfor-
 A. K. Sahu and P. Dwivedi

Table 9 Comparison results in

terms of M AE Methods % of observed ratings

1% 1.5% 2% 2.5% 2.9%

AF 1.1747 1.0921 1.0792 1.0735 1.0639

± 0.0058 ±0.004 ± 0.0036 ±0.0024 ± 0.0031
kNN-CF 1.0542 1.0374 1.0329 1.0281 1.0151
± 0.0054 ±0.0082 ± 0.0091 ± 0.0048 ±0.0078
AF with bais 0.8535 0.8485 0.8416 0.8408 0.8371
± 0.0058 ±0.0038 ± 0.0036 ± 0.0026 ±0.0028
MF 0.8006 0.7907 0.7830 0.7765 0.7392
± 0.0039 ±0.0025 ± 0.0029 ±0.004 ± 0.0039
cPMF 0.7921 0.7816 0.7790 0.7459 0.7245
v 0.0049 ± 0.0064 ± 0.0038 ± 0.0028 ± 0.0045
CBT 0.7839 0.7845 0.7746 0.7576 0.7249
± 0.0058 ± 0.0049 ± 0.0035 ± 0.0035 ± 0.0038
UPC-CF 0.8542 0.8452 0.8256 0.8011 0.7888
± 0.0074 ± 0.0041 ± 0.0052 ± 0.0075 ± 0.0091
NUSC-CF 0.7912 0.7875 0.7653 0.7622 0.7503
± 0.0082 ± 0.0042 ± 0.0046 ± 0.0074 ± 0.0081
UP-CDRSs 0.7746 0.7617 0.7538 0.7215 0.7042
± 0.0025 ±0.0035 ± 0.004 ±0.0043 ± 0.0026

mance of our UP-CDRSs method, we have used MAE and methods, respectively. Table 11 shows overall performance
RMSE as evaluation metrics. Table 9 and 10 show MAE based on average MAE and average RMSE of different
and RMSE performance of proposed method over existing sparsity levels. Bold symbols in Tables 9, 10 and 11 show

Table 10 Comparison results

in terms of R M S E Methods % of observed ratings

1% 1.5% 2% 2.5% 2.9%

AF 1.4442 1.3878 1.3771 1.3745 1.3659

± 0.0093 ± 0.0048 ±0.0051 ± 0.0026 ± 0.0039
kNN-CF 1.1549 1.1254 1.1081 1.0973 1.0882
± 0.0079 ± 0.0041 ± 0.0045 ± 0.0028 ± 0.0053
AF with bais 1.1139 1.1106 1.1015 1.0869 1.0741
± 0.0073 ±0.005 ± 0.0034 ± 0.0029 ± 0.004
MF 1.056 1.0483 1.0384 1.0289 1.0188
± 0.0058 ± 0.0054 ± 0.0042 ±0.0044 ± 0.0026
cPMF 1.0526 1.0485 1.0257 1.0146 1.0085
± 0.0039 ± 0.0036 ± 0.0032 ± 0.0044 ± 0.0038
CBT 1.0498 1.0347 1.0212 1.0047 0.9914
±0.0048 ± 0.0066 ± 0.0032 ± 0.0044 ± 0.0057
UPC-CF 1.1058 1.0951 1.0746 1.0731 1.0701
± 0.0028 ± 0.0091 ± 0.0079 ± 0.0076 ± 0.0025
NUSC-CF 1.1019 1.0945 1.0891 1.0745 1.0684
± 0.0042 ± 0.0046 ± 0.0018 ± 0.0078 ± 0.0086
UP-CDRSs 1.0315 1.0234 1.0179 0.9987 0.9841
± 0.0034 ± 0.0045 ± 0.0065 ± 0.005 ± 0.0061
User profile as a bridge in cross-domain...

Table 11 The overall performance based on average MAE and average (vii) Our UP-CDRSs method gave superior results com-
RMSE of different sparsity levels pared with all state-of-the-art with and without trans-
Methods The overall performance fer learning learning methods. Comparing with CBT,
MAE and RMSE performance have increased by
MAE RMSE 3% and 1% respectively. Comparing with NUSC-CF,
3.6% MAE has increased.
AF 1.0967 1.3899
± 0.0038 ± 0.0051
kNN-CF 1.0335 1.1148
6 Conclusion and future direction
± 0.0071 ± 0.0049
AF with bais 0.8443 1.0974
In this paper, we have proposed a novel method name as
± 0.0037 ± 0.0045
User Profile as a Bridge in Cross-domain Recommender
MF 0.7780 1.0381
Systems (UP-CDRSs) for knowledge transfer from source
± 0.0034 ± 0.0045 to the target domain. For establishing a bridge between
cPMF 0.7646 1.0300 domains, we have used user profile which is build from
± 0.0045 ± 0.0038 user’s preferences and demographical information of a user.
CBT 0.7651 1.0204 After building the user profile in both domains, we calculate
± 0.0043 ± 0.0050 many similarity between users profile of distinct domains,
UPC-CF 0.8230 1.0837 and we then apply alternating least square approach in
± 0.0067 ± 0.0060 objective function which is formulated by probabilistic
NUSC-CF 0.7713 1.0850 graphical model. After learning all latent factor of user and
± 0.0065 ± 0.0054 item, prediction on unrated items in the target domain is
UP-CDRSs 0.7432 1.0111 made using corresponding latent factors of user and item.
± 0.0034 ± 0.0051 We have done five experiments to validate UP-CDRSs
method and analysed how transfer learning is effective in
CDRSs framework. The experimental results show that our
the higher performance (lower MAE and RMSE) of our
proposed UP-CDRSs method performs significantly better
proposed UP-CDRSs method over existing methods.
than several with and without transfer learning methods.
The following observation can be made from the results:
In future, we will extend our method to use a slightly
(i) A first method AF, we can observe that it gave the different types of domain, for instance (movie v/s book) to
very worse results in terms of accuracy performance. check how to transfer learning framework is significantly
Another observation is that while increasing the size effective.
of the training set, not much improvement in accuracy
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to
was made. jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
(ii) kNN-CF is one of the traditional methods of CF.
It gave better results compared to the AF method.
As the training data increased, the performance of References
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