Incorporating a Triple Graph Neural Network with Multiple Implicit Feedback for Social Recommendation

Graph neural networks have been clearly proven to be powerful in recommendation tasks since they can capture high-order user-item interactions and integrate them with rich attributes. However, they are still limited by the cold-start problem and data sparsity. Using social relationships to assist recommendation is an effective practice, but it can only moderately alleviate these problems. In addition, rich attributes are often unavailable, which prevents graph neural networks from being fully effective. Hence, we propose to enrich the model by mining multiple implicit feedback and constructing a triple GCN component. We have noticed that users may be influenced not only by their trusted friends but also by the ratings that already exist. The implicit influence spreads among the item’s previous and potential raters, and makes a difference on future ratings. The implicit influence is analyzed on the mechanism of information propagation, and fused with the user’s binary implicit attitude, since negative influence propagates as well as the positive one. Furthermore, we leverage explicit feedback, social relationships, and multiple implicit feedback in the triple GCN component. Abundant experiments on real-world datasets reveal that our model has improved significantly in the rating prediction task compared with other state-of-the-art methods.