Combining social relations and interaction data in recommender system with graph convolution collaborative filtering

Abstract

A recommender system is an important subject in the field of data mining, where the item rating information from users is exploited and processed to make suitable recommendations with all other users. The recommender system creates convenience for e-commerce users and stimulates the consumption of items that are suitable for users. In addition to e-commerce, a recommender system is also used to provide recommendations on books to read, movies to watch, courses to take or websites to visit. Similarity between users is an important impact for recommendation, which could be calculated from the data of past user ratings of the item by methods of collaborative filtering, matrix factorization or singular vector decomposition. In the development of graph data mining techniques, the relationships between users and items can be represented by matrices from which collaborative filtering could be done with the larger database, more accurate and faster in calculation. All these data can be represented graphically and mined by today’s highly developed graph neural network models. On the other hand, users’ social friendship data also influence consumption habits because recommendations from friends will be considered more carefully than information sources. However, combining a user’s friend influence and the similarity between users whose similar shopping habits is challenging. Because the information is noisy and it affects each particular data set in different ways. In this study, we present the input data processing method to remove outliers which are single reviews or users with little interaction with the items; the next proposed model will combine the social relationship data and the similarity in the rating history of users to improve the accuracy and recall of the recommender system. We perform a comparative assessment of the influence of each data set and calculation method on the final recommendation. We also propose and implement a model and compared it with base line models which include NGCF, LightGCN, WiGCN, SocialLGN and SEPT.