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A Neural Influence Diffusion Model for Social Recommendation

Published: 18 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Precise user and item embedding learning is the key to building a successful recommender system. Traditionally, Collaborative Filtering (CF) provides a way to learn user and item embeddings from the user-item interaction history. However, the performance is limited due to the sparseness of user behavior data. With the emergence of online social networks, social recommender systems have been proposed to utilize each user's local neighbors' preferences to alleviate the data sparsity for better user embedding modeling. We argue that, for each user of a social platform, her potential embedding is influenced by her trusted users, with these trusted users are influenced by the trusted users' social connections. As social influence recursively propagates and diffuses in the social network, each user's interests change in the recursive process. Nevertheless, the current social recommendation models simply developed static models by leveraging the local neighbors of each user without simulating the recursive diffusion in the global social network, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a deep influence propagation model to stimulate how users are influenced by the recursive social diffusion process for social recommendation. For each user, the diffusion process starts with an initial embedding that fuses the related features and a free user latent vector that captures the latent behavior preference. The key idea of our proposed model is that we design a layer-wise influence propagation structure to model how users' latent embeddings evolve as the social diffusion process continues. We further show that our proposed model is general and could be applied when the user~(item) attributes or the social network structure is not available. Finally, extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed model, with more than 13% performance improvements over the best baselines for top-10 recommendation on the two datasets.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGIR'19: Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
July 2019
1512 pages
ISBN:9781450361729
DOI:10.1145/3331184
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 July 2019

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Author Tags

  1. graph neural networks
  2. influence diffusion
  3. personalization
  4. social recommendation

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

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SIGIR '19
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SIGIR'19 Paper Acceptance Rate 84 of 426 submissions, 20%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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  • (2025)Causal disentanglement for regulating social influence bias in social recommendationNeurocomputing10.1016/j.neucom.2024.129133618(129133)Online publication date: Feb-2025
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