| dc.description.abstract | Personalized recommendation systems use the data generated by user-item interactions (for example, in the form of ratings) to predict different users interests in available items and recommend a set of items or products to the users. The sparsity of data, cold start, and scalability are some of the important challenges faced by the developers of recommendation systems. These problems are alleviated by using external information, which can be in the form of a social network or a heterogeneous information network, or cross-domain knowledge. This thesis develops novel neural network models for designing personalized recommendation systems using the available external information.
The first part of the thesis studies the top-N item recommendation setting where the external information is available in the form of a social network or heterogeneous information network. Unlike a simple recommendation setting, capturing complex relationships amongst entities (users, items, and connected objects) becomes essential when a social and heterogeneous information network is available. In a social network, all socially connected users do not have equal influence on each other. Further, estimating the quantum of influence among entities in a user-item interaction network is important when only implicit ratings are available. We address these challenges by proposing a novel neural network model, SoRecGAT, which employs a multi-head and multi-layer graph attention mechanism. The attention mechanism helps the model learn the influence of entities on each other more accurately. Further, we exploit heterogeneous information networks (HIN) to gather multiple views for the items. A novel neural network model -- GAMMA (Graph and Multi-view Memory Attention mechanism) is proposed to extract relevant information from HINs. The proposed model is an end-to-end model which eliminates the need for learning a similarity matrix offline using some manually selected meta-paths before optimizing the desired objective function.
In the second part of the thesis, we focus on top-N bundle recommendation and list continuation setting. Bundle recommendation is the task of recommending a group of products instead of individual products to users. We study two interesting challenges -- (1) how to personalize and recommend existing bundles to users and (2) how to generate personalized novel bundles targeting specific users. We propose GRAM-SMOT -- a graph attention-based framework that considers higher-order relationships among the users, items, and bundles and the relative influence of items present in the bundles. For efficiently learning the embeddings of the entities, we define a loss function based on the metric-learning approach. A strategy that leverages submodular optimization ideas is used to generate novel bundles.
We also study the problem of top-N personalized list continuation where the task is to curate the next items to user-generated lists (ordered sequence of items) in a personalized way by using the sequential information of the items in the list. The main challenge in this task is understanding the ternary relationships among the users, items, and lists. We propose HyperTeNet -- a self-attention hypergraph and Transformer-based neural network architecture for the personalized list continuation task. Here, graph convolutions are used to learn the multi-hop relationship among entities of the same type. A self-attention-based hypergraph neural network is proposed to learn the ternary relationships among the interacting entities via hyperlink prediction in a 3-uniform hypergraph. Further, the entity embeddings are shared with a Transformer-based architecture and are learned through an alternating optimization procedure.
The final part of the thesis focuses on the personalized rating prediction setting where external information is available in the form of cross-domain knowledge. We propose an end-to-end neural network model, NeuCDCF, that provides a way to alleviate data sparsity problems by exploiting the information from related domains. NeuCDCF is based on a wide and deep framework and learns the representations jointly using matrix factorization and deep neural networks. We study the challenges involved in handling diversity between domains and learning complex non-linear relationships among entities within and across domains.
We conduct extensive experiments in each of these settings using several real-world datasets and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed models. | en_US |
