Disentangled Variational Autoencoder for Social Recommendation

Social recommendation aims to improve the recommendation performance by learning user interest and social representations from users’ interaction records and social relations. Intuitively, these learned representations entangle user interest factors with social factors because users’ interaction behaviors and social relations affect each other. A high-quality recommender system should provide items to a user according to his/her interest factors. However, most existing social recommendation models aggregate the two kinds of representations indiscriminately, and this kind of aggregation limits their recommendation performance. In this paper, we develop a model called Disentangled Variational autoencoder for Social Recommendation (DVSR) to disentangle interest and social factors from the two kinds of user representations. Firstly, we perform a preliminary analysis of the entangled information on three popular social recommendation datasets. Then, we present the model architecture of DVSR, which is based on the Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) framework. Besides the traditional method of training VAE, we also use contrastive estimation to penalize the mutual information between interest and social factors. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our model.