Graph-Community-Enabled Personalized Course-Job Recommendations with Cross-Domain Data Integration

Abstract

With millions of students/employees browsing course information and job postings every day, the need for accurate, effective, meaningful, and transparent course and job recommender systems is more evident than ever. The current recommendation research has attracted wide attention in the academic and industrial areas. However, existing studies primarily focus on content analysis and user feature extraction of courses or jobs and fail to investigate the problem of cross-domain data integration between career and education. At the same time, it also fails to fully utilize the relations between courses, skills, and jobs, which helps to improve the accuracy of the recommendation. Therefore, this study aims to propose a novel cross-domain recommendation model that can help students/employees search for suitable courses and jobs. Employing a heterogeneous graph and community detection algorithm, this study presents the Graph-Community-Enabled (GCE) model that merges course profiles and recruiting information data. Specifically, to address the skill difference between occupation and curriculum, the skill community calculated by the community detection algorithm is used to connect curriculum and job information. Then, the innovative heterogeneous graph approach and the random walk algorithm enable cross-domain information recommendation. The proposed model is evaluated on real job datasets from recruitment websites and the course datasets from MOOCs and higher education. Experiments show that the model is obviously superior to the classical baselines. The approach described can be replicated in a variety of education/career situations.