  One of the most efficient methods in collaborative filtering is matrix
factorization, which finds the latent vector representations of users and items
based on the ratings of users to items. However, a matrix factorization based
algorithm suffers from the cold-start problem: it cannot find latent vectors
for items to which previous ratings are not available. This paper utilizes
click data, which can be collected in abundance, to address the cold-start
problem. We propose a probabilistic item embedding model that learns item
representations from click data, and a model named EMB-MF, that connects it
with a probabilistic matrix factorization for rating prediction. The
experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is
not only effective in recommending items with no previous ratings, but also
outperforms competing methods, especially when the data is very sparse.
