Neural Models for Personalized Recommendation Systems with External Information

Abstract

Personalized recommendation systems use the data generated by user-item interactions (for example, in the form of ratings) to predict different users interests in available items and recommend a set of items or products to the users. The sparsity of data, cold start, and scalability are some of the important challenges faced by the developers of recommendation systems. These problems are alleviated by using external information, which can be in the form of a social network or a heterogeneous information network, or cross-domain knowledge. This thesis develops novel neural network models for designing personalized recommendation systems using the available external information. The first part of the thesis studies the top-N item recommendation setting where the external information is available in the form of a social network or heterogeneous information network. Unlike a simple recommendation setting, capturing complex relationships amongst entities (users, items, and connected objects) becomes essential when a social and heterogeneous information network is available. In a social network, all socially connected users do not have equal influence on each other. Further, estimating the quantum of influence among entities in a user-item interaction network is important when only implicit ratings are available. We address these challenges by proposing a novel neural network model, SoRecGAT, which employs a multi-head and multi-layer graph attention mechanism. The attention mechanism helps the model learn the influence of entities on each other more accurately. Further, we exploit heterogeneous information networks (HIN) to gather multiple views for the items. A novel neural network model -- GAMMA (Graph and Multi-view Memory Attention mechanism) is proposed to extract relevant information from HINs. The proposed model is an end-to-end model which eliminates the need for learning a similarity matrix offline using some manually selected meta-paths before optimizing the desired objective function. In the second part ...