PARS: Partial-Label-Learning-inspired Recommender Systems

Abstract

Recommender systems are widely required and deployed to address real-world problems. In this paper, we study a new yet challenging real-world setting for recommender systems, where only user browsing histories are available without any explicit feedback. No item acquisition information, e.g., purchasing or rating, is given. By assuming that user browsing sequences are likely to contain the items to acquire, we draw an analogy to the setting of partial label learning in weakly supervised learning. This enables us to train reliable recommender systems only using browsing histories. We term the proposed method as Partial Acquisition Recommender System (PARS). Empirical results on real-world benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Surprisingly, we also show that the proposed method even surpasses some baselines using item acquisition information.