AutoRec: An Automated Recommender System

Realistic recommender systems are often required to adapt to ever-changing data and tasks or to explore different models systematically. To address the need, we present AutoRec  1  2, an open-source automated machine learning (AutoML) platform extended from the TensorFlow [3] ecosystem and, to our knowledge, the first framework to leverage AutoML for model search and hyperparameter tuning in deep recommendation models. AutoRec also supports a highly flexible pipeline that accommodates both sparse and dense inputs, rating prediction and click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks, and an array of recommendation models. Lastly, AutoRec provides a simple, user-friendly API. Experiments conducted on the benchmark datasets reveal AutoRec is reliable and can identify models which resemble the best model without prior knowledge.