A Unified Framework for Cross-Domain and Cross-System Recommendations

Feng Zhu, Yan Wang, Jun Zhou, Chaochao Chen, Longfei Li, Guanfeng Liu

Abstract: Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) and Cross-System Recommendation (CSR) have been proposed to improve the recommendation accuracy in a target dataset (domain/system) with the help of a source one with relatively richer information. However, most existing CDR and CSR approaches are single-target, namely, there is a single target dataset, which can only help the target dataset and thus cannot benefit the source dataset. In this paper, we focus on three new scenarios, i.e., Dual-Target CDR (DTCDR), Multi-Target CDR (MTCDR), and CDR+CSR, and aim to improve the recommendation accuracy in all datasets simultaneously for all scenarios. To do this, we propose a unified framework, called GA (based on <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">G</i> raph embedding and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">A</i> ttention techniques), for all three scenarios. In GA, we first construct separate heterogeneous graphs to generate more representative user and item embeddings. Then, we propose an element-wise attention mechanism to effectively combine the embeddings of common entities (users/items) learned from different datasets. Moreover, to avoid negative transfer, we further propose a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">P</i> ersonalized training strategy to minimize the embedding difference of common entities between a richer dataset and a sparser dataset, deriving three new models, i.e., GA-DTCDR-P, GA-MTCDR-P, and GA-CDR+CSR-P, for the three scenarios respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed GA models significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.