Collaborative Prediction for Multi-entity Interaction With Hierarchical Representation

Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang

Abstract: With the rapid growth of Internet applications, there are more and more entities in interaction scenarios, and thus collaborative prediction for multi-entity interaction is becoming a significant problem. The state-of-the-art methods, e.g., tensor factorization and factorization machine, predict multi-entity interaction based on calculating the similarity among all entities. However, these methods are usually not able to reveal the joint characteristics of entities in the interaction. Besides, some methods may succeed in one specific application, but they can not be extended effectively for other applications or interaction scenarios with more entities. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Interaction Representation (HIR) model, which models the mutual action among different entities as a joint representation. We generate the interaction representation of two entities via tensor multiplication, which is preformed iteratively to construct a hierarchical structure among all entities. Moreover, we employ several hidden layers to reveal the underlying properties of this interaction and enhance the model performance. After generating final representation, the prediction can be calculated using a variety of machine learning methods according to different tasks (i.e., linear regression for regression tasks, pair-wise ranking for ranking tasks and logistic regression for classification tasks). Experimental results show that our proposed HIR model yields significant improvements over the competitive compared methods in four different application scenarios (i.e., general recommendation, context-aware recommendation, latent collaborative retrieval and click-through rate prediction).