Bayesian Inference via Variational Approximation for Collaborative Filtering

Variational approximation method finds wide applicability in approximating difficult-to-compute probability distributions, a problem that is especially important in Bayesian inference to estimate posterior distributions. Latent factor model is a classical model-based collaborative filtering approach that explains the user-item association by characterizing both items and users on latent factors inferred from rating patterns. Due to the sparsity...