# Revisiting SVD to generate powerful Node Embeddings for Recommendation Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03665/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Graph Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05679/) (2018)
- [Variational Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05814/) (2018)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Malicious Account Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12307/) (2020)
- [Every Document Owns Its Structure: Inductive Text Classification via Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13826/) (2020)
- [HeteGCN: Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12842/) (2020)
- [BridgeDPI: A Novel Graph Neural Network for Predicting Drug-Protein Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12547/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Representation Learning (GRL) is an upcoming and promising area in recommendation systems. In this paper, we revisit the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of adjacency matrix for embedding generation of users and items and use a two-layer neural network on top of these embeddings to learn relevance between user-item pairs. Inspired by the success of higher-order learning in GRL, we further propose an extension of this method to include two-hop neighbors for SVD through the second order of the adjacency matrix and demonstrate improved performance compared with the simple SVD method which only uses one-hop neighbors. Empirical validation on three publicly available datasets of recommendation system demonstrates that the proposed methods, despite being simple, beat many state-of-the-art methods and for two of three datasets beats all of them up to a margin of 10%. Through our research, we want to shed light on the effectiveness of matrix factorization approaches, specifically SVD, in the deep learning era and show that these methods still contribute as important baselines in recommendation systems.