Social Recommendation in Heterogeneous Evolving Relation Network

The appearance and growth of social networking brings an exponential growth of information. One of the main solutions proposed for this information overload problem are recommender systems, which provide personalized results. Most existing social recommendation approaches consider relation information to improve recommendation performance in the static context. However, relations are likely to evolve over time in the dynamic network. Therefore, temporal information is an essential ingredient to making social recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel social recommendation model based on evolving relation network, named SoERec. The learned evolving relation network is a heterogeneous information network, where the strength of relation between users is a sum of the influence of all historical events. We incorporate temporally evolving relations into the recommendation algorithm. We empirically evaluate the proposed method on two widely-used datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art social recommendation methods.