Modelling High-Order Social Relations for Item Recommendation

The prevalence of online social network makes it compulsory to study how social relations affect user choice. However, most existing methods leverage only first-order social relations, that is, the direct neighbors that are connected to the target user. The high-order social relations, e.g., the friends of friends, which very informative to reveal user preference, have been largely ignored. In this work, we focus on modeling the indirect influence from the high-order neighbors in social networks to improve the performance of item recommendation. Distinct from mainstream social recommenders that regularize the model learning with social relations, we instead propose to directly factor social relations in the predictive model, aiming at learning better user embeddings to improve recommendation. To address the challenge that high-order neighbors increase dramatically with the order size, we propose to recursively "propagate" embeddings along the social network, effectively injecting the influence of high-order neighbors into user representation. We conduct experiments on two real datasets of Yelp and Douban to verify our High-Order Social Recommender (HOSR) model. Empirical results show that our HOSR significantly outperforms recent graph regularization-based recommenders NSCR and IF-BPR+, and graph convolutional network-based social influence prediction model DeepInf, achieving new state-of-the-arts of the task.