apache/incubator-spark — pull request #500 by srowen (2014-01-23 17:46:09+00:00)
Title: Support negative implicit input in ALS

I'm back with another less trivial suggestion for ALS:

In ALS for implicit feedback, input values are treated as weights on squared-errors in a loss function (or rather, the weight is a simple function of the input r, like c = 1 + alpha*r). The paper on which it's based assumes that the input is positive. Indeed, if the input is negative, it will create a negative weight on squared-errors, which causes things to go haywire. The optimization will try to make the error in a cell as large possible, and the result is silently bogus.

There is a good use case for negative input values though. Implicit feedback is usually collected from signals of positive interaction like a view or like or buy, but equally, can come from "not interested" signals. The natural representation is negative values.

The algorithm can be extended quite simply to provide a sound interpretation of these values: negative values should encourage the factorization to come up with 0 for cells with large negative input values, just as much as positive values encourage it to come up with 1.

The implications for the algorithm are simple:
* the confidence function value must not be negative, and so can become 1 + alpha*|r|
* the matrix P should have a value 1 where the input R is _positive_, not merely where it is non-zero. Actually, that's what the paper already says, it's just that we can't assume P = 1 when a cell in R is specified anymore, since it may be negative

This in turn entails just a few lines of code change in `ALS.scala`:
* `rs(i)` becomes `abs(rs(i))`
* When constructing `userXy(us(i))`, it's implicitly only adding where P is 1. That had been true for any us(i) that is iterated over, before, since these are exactly the ones for which P is 1. But now P is zero where rs(i) <= 0, and should not be added

I think it's a safe change because:
* It doesn't change any existing behavior (unless you're using negative values, in which case results are already borked)
* It's the simplest direct extension of the paper's algorithm
* (I've used it to good effect in production FWIW)

Tests included.

I tweaked minor things en route:
* `ALS.scala` javadoc writes "R = Xt*Y" when the paper and rest of code defines it as "R = X*Yt"
* RMSE in the ALS tests uses a confidence-weighted mean, but the denominator is not actually sum of weights

Excuse my Scala style; I'm sure it needs tweaks.