I'm currently in the process of building a recommendation system with implicit data (e.g. clicks, views, purchases), however much of the research I've looked at seems to skip the step of "aggregating implicit data". For example, how do you aggregate multiple clicks and purchases overtime into a single user rating (as is required for a standard matrix factorization model)?
I've been experimenting with several Matrix Factorization based methods, including Neural Collaborative Filtering, Deep Factorization Machines, LightFM, and Variational Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering. None of these papers seem to address the issue of aggregating implicit data. They also do not discuss how to weight different types of user events (e.g. clicks vs purchase) when calculating a score.
For now I've been using a confidence score approach (the conference score corresponds to the count of events) as outlined in this paper: http://yifanhu.net/PUB/cf.pdf. However this approach doesn't address incorporating other types of user events (other than clicks), nor does it address negative implicit feedback (e.g. a ton of impressions with zero clicks).
Anyway, I'd love some insight on this topic! Any thoughts at all would be hugely appreciated!