English

Temporal Collaborative Filtering with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Artificial Intelligence 2020-10-14 v1

Abstract

Temporal collaborative filtering (TCF) methods aim at modelling non-static aspects behind recommender systems, such as the dynamics in users' preferences and social trends around items. State-of-the-art TCF methods employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model such aspects. These methods deploy matrix-factorization-based (MF-based) approaches to learn the user and item representations. Recently, graph-neural-network-based (GNN-based) approaches have shown improved performance in providing accurate recommendations over traditional MF-based approaches in non-temporal CF settings. Motivated by this, we propose a novel TCF method that leverages GNNs to learn user and item representations, and RNNs to model their temporal dynamics. A challenge with this method lies in the increased data sparsity, which negatively impacts obtaining meaningful quality representations with GNNs. To overcome this challenge, we train a GNN model at each time step using a set of observed interactions accumulated time-wise. Comprehensive experiments on real-world data show the improved performance obtained by our method over several state-of-the-art temporal and non-temporal CF models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.06425,
  title  = {Temporal Collaborative Filtering with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks},
  author = {Esther Rodrigo Bonet and Duc Minh Nguyen and Nikos Deligiannis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.06425},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:18:49.587Z