Collaborative Neural Social Recommendation

Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most popular techniques for building recommender systems. To overcome the data sparsity in CF, social recommender systems have emerged to boost recommendation performance by utilizing social correlation among users’ interests. Recently, inspired by the immense success of deep learning for embedding learning, neural network-based recommender systems have shown promising recommendation performance. Nevertheless, few researchers have attempted to tackle the social recommendation problem with neural models. To this end, in this paper, we design a neural architecture that organically combines the intrinsic relationship between social network structure and user–item interaction behavior for social recommendation. Two key challenges arise in this process: first, how to incorporate the social correlation of users’ interests in this neural model, and second, how to design a neural architecture to capture the unique characteristics of user–item interaction behavior for recommendation. To tackle these two challenges, we develop a model named collaborative neural social recommendation (CNSR) with two parts: 1) a social embedding part and 2) a collaborative neural recommendation (CNR) part. In CNSR, the user embedding leverages each user’s social embedding learned from an unsupervised deep learning technique with social correlation regularization. The user and item embeddings are then fed into a unique neural network with a newly designed collaboration layer to model both the shallow collaborative and deep complex interaction relationships between users and items. We further propose a joint learning framework to allow the social embedding part and the CNR part to mutually enhance each other. Finally, extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.