Implicit ZCA Whitening Effects of Linear Autoencoders for Recommendation

Recently, in the field of recommendation systems, linear regression (autoencoder) models have been investigated as a way to learn item similarity. In this paper, we show a connection between a linear autoencoder model and ZCA whitening for recommendation data. In particular, we show that the dual form solution of a linear autoencoder model actually has ZCA whitening effects on feature vectors of items, while items are considered as input features in the primal problem of the autoencoder/regression model. We also show the correctness of applying a linear autoencoder to low-dimensional item vectors obtained using embedding methods such as Item2vec to estimate item-item similarities. Our experiments provide preliminary results indicating the effectiveness of whitening low-dimensional item embeddings.