Algorithmic Acceleration of Parallel ALS for Collaborative Filtering: Speeding up Distributed Big Data Recommendation in Spark
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Collaborative filtering algorithms are important building blocks in many practical recommendation systems. For example, many large-scale data processing environments include collaborative filtering models for which the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm is used to compute latent factor matrix decompositions. In this paper, we propose an approach to accelerate the convergence of parallel ALS-based optimization methods for collaborative filtering using a nonlinear conjugate gradient (NCG) wrapper around the ALS iterations. We also provide a parallel implementation of the accelerated ALS-NCG algorithm in the Apache Spark distributed data processing environment, and an efficient line search technique as part of the ALS-NCG implementation that requires only one pass over the data on distributed datasets. In serial numerical experiments on a linux workstation and parallel numerical experiments on a 16 node cluster with 256 computing cores, we demonstrate that the combined ALS-NCG method requires many fewer iterations and less time than standalone ALS to reach movie rankings with high accuracy on the MovieLens 20M dataset. In parallel, ALS-NCG can achieve an acceleration factor of 4 or greater in clock time when an accurate solution is desired; furthermore, the acceleration factor increases as greater numerical precision is required in the solution. Furthermore, the NCG acceleration mechanism is efficient in parallel and scales linearly with problem size on synthetic datasets with up to nearly 1 billion ratings. The acceleration mechanism is general and may also be applicable to other optimization methods for collaborative filtering.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".