user matrix

In recommendation systems, an embedding vector generated by matrix factorization that holds latent signals about user preferences. Each row of the user matrix holds information about the relative strength of various latent signals for a single user. For example, consider a movie recommendation system. In this system, the latent signals in the user matrix might represent each user's interest in particular genres, or might be harder-to-interpret signals that involve complex interactions across multiple factors. The user matrix has a column for each latent feature and a row for each user. That is, the user matrix has the same number of rows as the target matrix that is being factorized. For example, given a movie recommendation system for 1,000,000 users, the user matrix will have 1,000,000 rows.

Practitioners refer to user matrix when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.