Personalized entity recommendation: a heterogeneous information network approach

Among different hybrid recommendation techniques, network-based entity recommendation methods, which utilize user or item relationship information, are beginning to attract increasing attention recently. Most of the previous studies in this category only consider a single relationship type, such as friendships in a social network. In many scenarios, the entity recommendation problem exists in a heterogeneous information network environment. Different types of relationships can be potentially used to improve the recommendation quality. In this paper, we study the entity recommendation problem in heterogeneous information networks. Specifically, we propose to combine heterogeneous relationship information for each user differently and aim to provide high-quality personalized recommendation results using user implicit feedback data and personalized recommendation models. In order to take full advantage of the relationship heterogeneity in information networks, we first introduce meta-path-based latent features to represent the connectivity between users and items along different types of paths. We then define recommendation models at both global and personalized levels and use Bayesian ranking optimization techniques to estimate the proposed models. Empirical studies show that our approaches outperform several widely employed or the state-of-the-art entity recommendation techniques.