Considering similarity and the rating conversion of neighbors on neural collaborative filtering

One of the most popular recommender system techniques is collaborative filtering (CF). Nowadays, many researchers apply a neural network with CF, but few focus on the neighbors’ concept of CF. This work needs to consider two major issues: the similarity levels between the neighbors and the target user and the user’s rating pattern conversion. Because different neighbors have a different influence on the target user and different users usually have a different rating pattern, the ratings directly utilized by the neighbor’s preference pattern may be incorrect for the target user. Under two main issues, we try to accomplish three main ideas of CF’s prediction: the similarity between users’ levels, the neighbor’s rating, and the rating conversion. Thus, we propose three main modules, the rating conversion module, the similarity module, and the prediction module, to solve the two issues mentioned above. The rating conversion module projects the neighbor’s rating into the target user’s aspect. The similarity module uses the users’ attentions to compute similarity levels between users. Finally, these similarity levels and the converted ratings are integrated to perform the prediction. The proposed method is compared with the current CF with friends and latent factor model using two types of datasets: real-world and synthetic datasets. We evaluate N neighbors and all neighbors on real-world datasets to prove the number of neighbor is important. Moreover, the performance of the rating conversion module is also evaluated. The proposed method simulates the full rating datasets and the partial rating dataset to compare the effectiveness of using different types of distribution and dataset size. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively outperformed the baselines using ranking evaluation and prediction accuracy on real-world and synthetic datasets. Besides, The effectiveness of using different the number of neighbors depends on the quality of neighbors.