Deep Collaborative Recommendation Algorithm Based on Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Representation learning-based collaborative filtering (CF) methods address the linear relationship of user-items with dot products and cannot study the latent nonlinear relationship applied to implicit feedback. Matching function learning-based CF methods directly learn the complicated mapping functions that map user-item pairs to matching scores, which has limitations in identifying low-rank relationships. To this end, we propose a deep collaborative recommendation algorithm based on attention mechanism (DACR). First, before the user-item representations are input into the DNNs, we utilize the attention mechanism to adaptively assign different weights to the user-item representations, which captures the hidden information in implicit feedback. After that, we input the user-item representations with corresponding weights into the representation learning and matching function learning modules. Finally, we concatenate the prediction vectors learned from different dimensions to predict the matching scores. The results show that we can improve the expression ability of the model while taking into account not only the nonlinear information hidden in implicit feedback, but also the low-rank relationships of user-item pairs to obtain more accurate predictions. Through detailed experiments on two datasets, we find that the ranking capability of the DACR model is enhanced compared with other baseline models, and the evaluation metrics HR and NDCG of DACR are increased by 0.88–1.19% and 0.65–1.15%, respectively.

Keywords

• attention mechanism
• recommendation system
• implicit feedback
• representation learning
• matching function learning