H3Rec: Higher-order Heterogeneous and Homogeneous Interaction Modeling for Group Recommendations of Web Services

Recommendations are important web services in the era of information explosion. Particularly, group recommendations aim to suggest new items to groups such that the members of groups are likely interested in. However, existing works still suffer from sparsity and cold-start issues (e.g., cold-start groups or items) for groups with few interactions on items. Most of them model the preferences or features of entities (i.e., users, items and groups) from heterogeneous interactions (i.e., user-item, group-item and user-group interactions) between two distinct types of entities, while ignoring the homogeneous interactions (i.e., user-user, item-item and group-group interactions) between entities of one type. To this end, we propose a new model, called H3Rec, which learns the representations of entities by developing two graph embedding layers based on an interaction graph of all entities. Specifically, the two graph embedding layers make full use of the hidden information in the Higher-order Heterogeneous and Homogeneous interactions of the graph. Therefore, H3Rec can alleviate the sparsity and cold-start issues and improve the performance of group recommendations. The experimental results on two real world datasets in different domains show the superiority of H3Rec in group recommendations, especially for cold-start groups and items. © 2022 IEEE.