Word2Vec applied to Recommendation: Hyperparameters Matter
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Skip-gram with negative sampling, a popular variant of Word2vec originally designed and tuned to create word embeddings for Natural Language Processing, has been used to create item embeddings with successful applications in recommendation. While these fields do not share the same type of data, neither evaluate on the same tasks, recommendation applications tend to use the same already tuned hyperparameters values, even if optimal hyperparameters values are often known to be data and task dependent. We thus investigate the marginal importance of each hyperparameter in a recommendation setting, with an extensive joint hyperparameter optimization on various datasets. Results reveal that optimizing neglected hyperparameters, namely negative sampling distribution, number of epochs, subsampling parameter and window-size, significantly improves performance on a recommendation task, and can increase it up to a factor of 10.
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