Purify and Generate: Learning Faithful Item-to-Item Graph from Noisy User-Item Interaction Behaviors

Abstract

Matching is almost the first and most fundamental step in recommender systems, that is to quickly select hundreds or thousands of related entities from the whole commodity pool. Among all the matching methods, item-to-item (I2I) graph based matching is a handy and highly effective approach and is widely used in most applications, owing to the essential relationships of entities described in a powerful I2I graph. Yet, the I2I graph is not a ready-made product in a data source. To obtain it from users' behaviors, a common practice in the industry is to construct the graph based on the similarity of item embeddings or co-occurrence frequency directly. However, these methods tend to lose the complicated correlations (high-ordered or nonlinear) inside decision-making actions and cannot achieve the global optimal solution. Moreover, the correlations between items are usually contained in users' short-term actions, which are full of noise information (e.g. spurious association, missing connection). It is vitally important to filter out noise while generating the graph. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Purified Graph Generation (PGG) dedicated to learn faithful I2I graph from sparse and noisy behavior data. We capture the 'confidence value' between user and item to get rid of exception action during decision making, and leverage it to re-sample purified sets that are fed into an unsupervised I2I graph structure learning framework called GPBG. Extensive experimental results from both simulation and real data demonstrate that our method could significantly benefit the performance of I2I graph compared to the typical baselines.