Interpretable recommendations via overlapping co-clusters.

There is an increasing need to provide not only accurate but also interpretable recommendations, in order to enhance transparency and trust in the recommendation process. This is particularly important in a business-to-business setting, where recommendations are generated for experienced sales staff and not directly for the end-client. In this paper, we consider the problem of generating interpretable recommendations based on the purchase history of clients, or more general, based on positive or one-class ratings only. We present an algorithm that generates recommendations by identifying overlapping co-clusters consisting of clients and products. Our algorithm uses matrix factorization techniques to identify co-clusters, and recommends a client-product pair because of its membership in one or more client-product co-clusters. The algorithm exhibits linear complexity in the number of co-clusters and input examples, and can therefore be applied to very large datasets. We show, both on a real client-product dataset from our institution, as well as on publicly available datasets, that the recommendation accuracy of our algorithm is better than or equivalent to standard interpretable and non-interpretable recommendation techniques, such as standard one-class nearest neighbor and matrix factorization techniques. Most importantly, our approach is capable of offering textually and visually interpretable recommendations.