# UserReg: A Simple but Strong Model for Rating Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07601/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06902/) (2019)
- [Neural Factorization Machines for Sparse Predictive Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05027/) (2017)
- [Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10730/) (2017)
- [Geometric Matrix Completion with Recurrent Multi-Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06803/) (2017)
- [Inductive Matrix Completion Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12058/) (2019)
- [On the Difficulty of Evaluating Baselines: A Study on Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01395/) (2019)
- [Neural Network Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06443/) (2015)
- [A Neural Autoregressive Approach to Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09477/) (2016)
- [AutoSVD++: An Efficient Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Model via Contractive Auto-encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00551/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collaborative filtering (CF) has achieved great success in the field of recommender systems. In recent years, many novel CF models, particularly those based on deep learning or graph techniques, have been proposed for a variety of recommendation tasks, such as rating prediction and item ranking. These newly published models usually demonstrate their performance in comparison to baselines or existing models in terms of accuracy improvements. However, others have pointed out that many newly proposed models are not as strong as expected and are outperformed by very simple baselines. This paper proposes a simple linear model based on Matrix Factorization (MF), called UserReg, which regularizes users' latent representations with explicit feedback information for rating prediction. We compare the effectiveness of UserReg with three linear CF models that are widely-used as baselines, and with a set of recently proposed complex models that are based on deep learning or graph techniques. Experimental results show that UserReg achieves overall better performance than the fine-tuned baselines considered and is highly competitive when compared with other recently proposed models. We conclude that UserReg can be used as a strong baseline for future CF research.