Unified Collaborative Filtering over Graph Embeddings

Abstract

Collaborative Filtering (CF) by learning from the wisdom of crowds has become one of the most important approaches to recommender systems research, and various CF models have been designed and applied to different scenarios. However, a challenging task is how to select the most appropriate CF model for a specific recommendation task. In this paper, we propose a Unified Collaborative Filtering framework based on Graph Embeddings (UGrec for short) to solve the problem. Specifically, UGrec models user and item interactions within a graph network, and sequential recommendation path is designed as a basic unit to capture the correlations between users and items. Mathematically, we show that many representative recommendation approaches and their variants can be mapped as a recommendation path in the graph. In addition, by applying a carefully designed attention mechanism on the recommendation paths, UGrec can determine the significance of each sequential recommendation path so as to conduct automatic model selection. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our method shows significant improvements for recommendation quality. This work also leads to a deeper understanding of the connection between graph embeddings and recommendation algorithms.