Hierarchical Social Recommendation Model Based on a Graph Neural Network

Abstract

With the continuous accumulation of social network data, social recommendation has become a widely used recommendation method. Based on the theory of social relationship propagation, mining user relationships in social networks can alleviate the problems of data sparsity and the cold start of recommendation systems. Therefore, integrating social information into recommendation systems is of profound importance. We present an efficient network model for social recommendation. The model is based on the graph neural network. It unifies the attention mechanism and bidirectional LSTM into the same framework and uses a multilayer perceptron. In addition, an embedded propagation method is added to learn the neighbor influences of different depths and extract useful neighbor information for social relationship modeling. We use this method to solve the problem that the current research methods of social recommendation only extract the superficial level of social networks but ignore the importance of the relationship strength of the users at different levels in the recommendation. This model integrates social relationships into user and project interactions, not only capturing the weight of the relationship between different users but also considering the influence of neighbors at different levels on user preferences. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to other benchmark methods with respect to mean absolute error and root mean square error and can effectively improve the quality of recommendations.