Improving recommendation accuracy using networks of substitutable and complementary products

Recommender systems are ubiquitous in applications ranging from e-commerce to social media, helping users to navigate a huge selection of items and to meet a variety of special needs and user tastes. Incorporating contextual knowledge into such systems — such as relational information — has proven to be an effective way to improve recommendation accuracy. A popular line of research aims to model relationships between users, through their connections in a social network. In contrast, we aim to model complex relationships between products, using data based on co-purchase and co-browsing behavior. Modeling such networks presents a variety of challenges, in particular because the features that make two items complementary (or likely to be co-purchased) are far more complex than mere similarity. To model these complex relationships we develop a method based on pairwise ranking and embedding learning to build representations of items based on their co-purchasing and co-browsing statistics. We conduct experiments on Amazon product data to demonstrate that modeling such relationships significantly improves accuracy compared to competitive baselines.