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Community Preserving Social Recommendation with Cyclic Transfer Learning

Published: 29 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Transfer learning-based recommendation mitigates the sparsity of user-item interactions by introducing auxiliary domains. Social influence extracted from direct connections between users typically serves as an auxiliary domain to improve prediction performance. However, direct social connections also face severe data sparsity problems that limit model performance. In contrast, users’ dependency on communities is another valuable social information that has not yet received sufficient attention. Although studies have incorporated community information into recommendation by aggregating users’ preferences within the same community, they seldom capture the structural discrepancies among communities and the influence of structural discrepancies on users’ preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a community-preserving recommendation framework with cyclic transfer learning, incorporating heterogeneous community influence into the rating domain. We analyze the characteristics of the community domain and its inter-influence on the rating domain, and construct link constraints and preference constraints in the community domain. The shared vectors that bridge the rating domain and the community domain are allowed to be more consistent with the characteristics of both domains. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets. The results manifest the excellent performance of our approach in capturing real users’ preferences compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

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  1. Community Preserving Social Recommendation with Cyclic Transfer Learning

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
    ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 42, Issue 3
    May 2024
    721 pages
    EISSN:1558-2868
    DOI:10.1145/3618081
    Issue’s Table of Contents

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 29 December 2023
    Online AM: 28 October 2023
    Accepted: 16 October 2023
    Revised: 28 August 2023
    Received: 07 December 2022
    Published in TOIS Volume 42, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Transfer learning
    2. matrix factorization
    3. community
    4. social recommendation
    5. rating prediction

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    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
    • National Natural Science Foundation of China
    • National Key R&D Program of China
    • Beijing Nova Program from Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission

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