Variational cold-start resistant recommendation

Abstract

Conventionally, cold-start limitations are managed by leveraging side information such as social-trust relationships. However, the relationships between users in social networks are complex, uncertain, and sparse. Therefore, it is necessary to extract beneficial social connections to make the recommendation models cold-start resistant. Towards this end, we propose a novel recommendation model called Variational Cold-start Resistant Recommendation (CORE-VAE). More concretely, we employ a social-aware similarity function and a graph convolutional network (GCN) to generate robust social-aware user representations that account for the complexities, uncertainties, and sparse nature of the social-trust network. Subsequently, these powerful social-aware representations aid us in producing cold-start resistant rating vectors for all users. To explore the rich user rating information, we propose an expressive variational autoencoder (VAE) model. Unlike earlier VAE-based CF models, CORE-VAE utilizes a novel prior distribution and a well-designed skip-generative network to alleviate the posterior collapse issue considerably. Besides, CORE-VAE can also capture the latent space’s uncertainty and ensure that observations and their accompanying latent variables have high mutual information. Overall, these novel techniques dramatically help produce better latent representations for generating more accurate recommendations. We show that CORE-VAE outperforms numerous competitive baseline models on real-world datasets through comprehensive empirical evaluation and analysis.