funkSVD starting values for U and V

[vkummer]

Hi, I would like to try other starting values for U and V in funkSVD. No matter what I do, tcrossprod(fsvd$U, fsvd$V) results in very similar predictions for the missing values per row but that's not what it is supposed to do. I already tried many different parameter combinations but that didn't help. So I was hoping, other starting values (e.g. matrix(rnorm(nrow(x)*k),nrow = nrow(x), ncol = k) might solve the problem. I tried to copy the function and initialize U and V with random numbers but R always crashes. Would it be possible to make the initialization of U and V a definable variable as well? Or do you have any other solution? Thanks.

[mhahsler]

The function is adapted from package rrecsys by Ludovik Coba and Markus Zanker. I am not sure that I can help you with this.