A serendipity-biased Deepwalk for collaborators recommendation

Scientific collaboration has become a common behaviour in academia. Various recommendation strategies have been designed to provide relevant collaborators for the target scholars. However, scholars are no longer satisfied with the acquainted collaborator recommendations, which may narrow their horizons. Serendipity in the recommender system has attracted increasing attention from researchers in recent years. Serendipity traditionally denotes the faculty of making surprising discoveries. The unexpected and valuable scientific discoveries in science such as X-rays and penicillin may be attributed to serendipity. In this paper, we design a novel recommender system to provide serendipitous scientific collaborators, which learns the serendipity-biased vector representation of each node in the co-author network. We first introduce the definition of serendipitous collaborators from three components of serendipity: relevance, unexpectedness, and value, respectively. Then we improve the transition probability of random walk in DeepWalk, and propose a serendipity-biased DeepWalk, called Seren2vec. The walker jumps to the next neighbor node with the proportional probability of edge weight in the co-author network. Meanwhile, the edge weight is determined by the three indices in definition. Finally, Top-N serendipitous collaborators are generated based on the cosine similarity between scholar vectors. We conducted extensive experiments on the DBLP data set to validate our recommendation performance, and the evaluations from serendipity-based metrics show that Seren2vec outperforms other baseline methods without much loss of recommendation accuracy.