Connecting latent relationships over heterogeneous attributed network for recommendation

Recently, deep neural network models for graph-structured data have been demonstrated to be influential in recommendation systems. Graph Neural Network (GNN), which can generate high-quality embeddings by capturing graph-structured information, is convenient for the recommendation. However, most existing GNN models mainly focus on the homogeneous graph. They cannot characterize heterogeneous and complex data in the recommendation system. Meanwhile, it is challenging to develop effective methods to mine the heterogeneity and latent correlations in the graph. In this paper, we adopt Heterogeneous Attributed Network (HAN), which involves different node types as well as rich node attributes, to model data in the recommendation system. Furthermore, we propose a novel graph neural network-based model to deal with HAN for Recommendation, called HANRec. In particular, we design a component connecting potential neighbors to explore the influence among neighbors and provide two different strategies with the attention mechanism to aggregate neighbors’ information. The experimental results on two real-world datasets prove that HANRec outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.