PRGAN: Personalized Recommendation with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Most of the existing methods define recommendation as regression or classification for user-item interactions and apply discriminative models. However, recommender systems suffer from interaction data sparsity and data noise problems in reality. Recent Generative Adversarial Network-based recommender systems have the potential to solve the aforementioned problems. The negative sampling methods use the generator to collect effective signals from a large amount of unlabeled data to alleviate the data sparsity problem, while they suffer from sparse rewards in the policy gradient training process. The vector reconstruction methods generate user-related vectors for data augmentation to enhance robustness, but they lead to redundant calculation and only take the user as a condition and ignore information conveyed by items. To alleviate the limitations of these methods, we propose a novel framework termed Personalized Recommendation with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (PRGAN) to consider both the user and the item subset as conditions and formulate conditional rating vector generation as a user-item matching problem. The sparsity of conditional rating vectors can be controlled in our method, which simplifies the discriminator’s learning task. Experiments are conducted on four datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.