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Multi-neighbor social recommendation with attentional graph convolutional network

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Abstract

The social network is usually utilized as auxiliary data to alleviate data sparsity and cold start problems of recommender systems. However, the social network obeys the power-law distribution and the social relations are indiscriminately utilized, resulting in providing insufficient and inaccurate information. Early efforts ignore these drawbacks and fail to exploit abundant information fully. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-neighbor social recommendation framework MNGCN based on graph convolutional network. The representations of user and item could be learned by iteratively integrating their multiple types of neighbor information. In addition, we apply a node-level attention mechanism to aggregate the same type of neighbors and a category-level attention mechanism to incorporate different categories of neighbors. A sampler is utilized to accurately select the social neighbors of users with regard to different items. Besides, the interactions and ratings are captured simultaneously in the user-item interactive network. Extensive experiments on two classical datasets illustrate that MNGCN achieves the best performance, and the ablation study demonstrates the necessity and the effectiveness of each component.

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Notes

  1. https://www.cse.msu.edu/\(\sim\)tangjili/datasetcode/truststudy.htm.

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Correspondence to Min Zhang.

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We would like to submit the enclosed manuscript entitled “Multi-neighbor Social Recommendation with Attentional Graph Convolutional Network”. No Conflict of interest exits in the submission of this manuscript, and manuscript is approved by all authors for publication. I would like to declare on behalf of my co-authors that the work described was original research that has not been published previously, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere, in whole or in part. All the authors listed have approved the manuscript that is enclosed.

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Zhang, M., Liao, X., Wang, X. et al. Multi-neighbor social recommendation with attentional graph convolutional network. Data Min Knowl Disc 39, 21 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-025-01094-7

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