# Modeling Dynamic User Interests: A Neural Matrix Factorization Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06602/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Evaluation of Neural Architectures Trained with Square Loss vs Cross-Entropy in Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07322/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Poisson Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.04640/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Efficient Generalized Low-Rank Tensor Contextual Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01771/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, there has been significant interest in understanding users' online content consumption patterns. But, the unstructured, high-dimensional, and dynamic nature of such data makes extracting valuable insights challenging. Here we propose a model that combines the simplicity of matrix factorization with the flexibility of neural networks to efficiently extract nonlinear patterns from massive text data collections relevant to consumers' online consumption patterns. Our model decomposes a user's content consumption journey into nonlinear user and content factors that are used to model their dynamic interests. This natural decomposition allows us to summarize each user's content consumption journey with a dynamic probabilistic weighting over a set of underlying content attributes. The model is fast to estimate, easy to interpret and can harness external data sources as an empirical prior. These advantages make our method well suited to the challenges posed by modern datasets. We use our model to understand the dynamic news consumption interests of Boston Globe readers over five years. Thorough qualitative studies, including a crowdsourced evaluation, highlight our model's ability to accurately identify nuanced and coherent consumption patterns. These results are supported by our model's superior and robust predictive performance over several competitive baseline methods.