Trust-aware recommendation based on heterogeneous multi-relational graphs fusion

Abstract Users’ trust relations have a significant influence on their choice towards different products. However, few recommendation or prediction algorithms both consider users’ social trust relations and item-related knowledge, which makes them difficult to cope with cold start and the data sparsity problems. In this paper, we propose a novel trust-ware recommendation method based on heterogeneous multi-relational graphs fusion, termed as T-MRGF. In contrast with other traditional methods, it fuses the user-related and item-related graphs with the user–item interaction graph and fully utilizes the high-level connections existing in heterogeneous graphs. Specifically, we first establish the user–user trust relation graph, user–item interaction graph and item–item knowledge graph, and the user feature and item feature, which have been obtained from the user–item graph, are used as the input of the user-related graph and the item-related graph respectively. The fusion is achieved through the cascade of feature vectors before and after feature propagation. In this way, the heterogeneous multi-relational graphs are fused for the feature propagation, which largely refines the user and item representation for model prediction. Simulation results show that the proposed method significantly improve the recommendation performance compared to the state-of-the-art KG-based algorithms both in accuracy and training efficiency.