Item2vec: Neural item embedding for collaborative filtering

Many Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are item-based in the sense that they analyze item-item relations in order to produce item similarities. Recently, several works in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) suggested to learn a latent representation of words using neural embedding algorithms. Among them, the Skip-gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS), also known as Word2vec, was shown to provide state-of-the-art results on various linguistics tasks. In this paper, we show that item-based CF can be cast in the same framework of neural word embedding. Inspired by SGNS, we describe a method we name Item2vec for item-based CF that produces embedding for items in a latent space. The method is capable of inferring item-item relations even when user information is not available. We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the Item2vec method and show it is competitive with SVD.