User churn migration analysis with DEDICOM

Time plays an important role regarding user preferences for products. It introduces asymmetries into the adoption of products which should be considered in the context of recommender systems and business intelligence. We therefore investigate how temporally asymmetric user preferences can be analyzed using a latent factor model called Decomposition Into Directional Components (DEDICOM). We introduce a new scalable hybrid algorithm that combines projected gradient descent and alternating least squares updates to compute DEDICOM and imposes semi-non negativity constraints to better interpret the resulting factors. We apply our model to analyze user churn and migration between different computer games in a social gaming environment.