  Collaborative filtering (CF) has been successfully used to provide users with
personalized products and services. However, dealing with the increasing
sparseness of user-item matrix still remains a challenge. To tackle such issue,
hybrid CF such as combining with content based filtering and leveraging side
information of users and items has been extensively studied to enhance
performance. However, most of these approaches depend on hand-crafted feature
engineering, which are usually noise-prone and biased by different feature
extraction and selection schemes. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid model
by generalizing contractive auto-encoder paradigm into matrix factorization
framework with good scalability and computational efficiency, which jointly
model content information as representations of effectiveness and compactness,
and leverage implicit user feedback to make accurate recommendations. Extensive
experiments conducted over three large scale real datasets indicate the
proposed approach outperforms the compared methods for item recommendation.
