Improving social and behavior recommendations via network embedding

With the rapid development of information technology, information is generated at an unprecedented rate. Users are in great need of recommender systems to provide the potential friends or interested items for them. Social (i.e. friend) recommendation and behavior (i.e. item) recommendation are two types of popular services in real-world applications. Although researchers have proposed various models for each task, a unified model to address both tasks elegantly and effectively is still in demand. In this paper, we propose a model called SBRNE which integrates social and behavior recommendations into a unified framework through modeling social and behavior information simultaneously. Specifically, SBRNE models social and behavior information simultaneously via employing users' latent interests as a bridge, and derives improved performance on both social and behavior recommendation tasks. In addition, by introducing an efficient network embedding procedure, users' latent representations are advanced, and effectiveness and efficiency of recommendation tasks are improved accordingly. Results on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that: 1). SBRNE outperforms selected baselines on social and behavior recommendation tasks; 2). SBRNE performs stable on recommendation tasks for cold-start users; 3). The network embedding procedure can improve the effectiveness of SBRNE; 4). The hyper-parameter learning procedure can improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of SBRNE. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.