  Recommender systems are aimed at generating a personalized ranked list of
items that an end user might be interested in. With the unprecedented success
of deep learning in computer vision and speech recognition, recently it has
been a hot topic to bridge the gap between recommender systems and deep neural
network. And deep learning methods have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art
on many recommendation tasks. For example, a recent model, NeuMF, first
projects users and items into some shared low-dimensional latent feature space,
and then employs neural nets to model the interaction between the user and item
latent features to obtain state-of-the-art performance on the recommendation
tasks. NeuMF assumes that the non-interacted items are inherent negative and
uses negative sampling to relax this assumption. In this paper, we examine an
alternative approach which does not assume that the non-interacted items are
necessarily negative, just that they are less preferred than interacted items.
Specifically, we develop a new classification strategy based on the widely used
pairwise ranking assumption. We combine our classification strategy with the
recently proposed neural collaborative filtering framework, and propose a
general collaborative ranking framework called Neural Network based
Collaborative Ranking (NCR). We resort to a neural network architecture to
model a user's pairwise preference between items, with the belief that neural
network will effectively capture the latent structure of latent factors. The
experimental results on two real-world datasets show the superior performance
of our models in comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches.
