Received March 4, 2020, accepted March 9, 2020, date of publication March 16, 2020, date of current version March

26, 2020.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2981253

Graph Filtering for Recommendation on

Heterogeneous Information Networks
CHUANYAN ZHANG 1 AND XIAOGUANG HONG2
1 School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Jinan 250101, China
2 Software College, Shandong University, Jinan 250101, China

Corresponding author: Chuanyan Zhang (chuanyan_zhang@sina.cn)

ABSTRACT Various kinds of auxiliary data in web services have been proved to be valuable to handler
data sparsity and cold-start problems of recommendation. However, it is challenging to develop effective
approaches to model and utilize these various and complex information. Due to the flexibility in modelling
data heterogeneity, heterogeneous information network (HIN) has been adopted to model auxiliary data for
sparsity recommendation, named HIN based recommendation. But most of these HIN based methods rely
on meta path-based similarity or graph embedding, which cannot fully mine global structure and semantic
features of users and items. Besides, these methods, utilizing extended matrix factorization model or deep
learning model, suffer expensive model-building problem and cannot treat personal latent factors carefully
since their global objective functions. In this paper, we model both rate and auxiliary data through a unified
graph and propose a graph filtering (GF) recommendation method on HINs. Distinct from traditional HIN
based methods, GF uses a rate pair structure to represent user’s feedback information and predict the rating
that says, ‘‘a predicted rating depends on its similar rating pairs.’’ Concretely, we design a semantic and
sign value-aware similarity measure based on SimRank, named Constrained SimRank, to weight rating pair
similarities on the unified graph and compute the predicting rate score for an active user via weighted average
of all similar ratings. Various semantics behind edges of the unified graph have different contributions for
the prediction. Thus, an adaptive framework is proposed to learn the weights of different semantic edges
and products an optimized predicted rating. Finally, experimental studies on various real-world datasets
demonstrate that GF is effective to handler the sparsity issue of recommendation and outperforms the state-
of-the-art techniques.

INDEX TERMS Recommender systems, graph filtering, constrained SimRank, heterogeneous information
networks.

I. INTRODUCTION Early generation CF methods, also known as memory-

Recommender system, which help users discover items of
interest from near-infinite collections, have been playing an
increasingly role in various online services, such as YouTube,
Amazon and Alibaba [1]–[3]. Among the techniques that
are utilized to recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF),
whose fundamental intuition is that if two users rate some
items similarly or have similar behaviors (e.g., watching,
buying), and hence will rate or act on other item similarly,
has shown its effectiveness and efficiency. Nowadays, CF is
widely regarded as one of the most successful methods for
building recommender systems.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and
approving it for publication was Mehul S. Raval . matrices, and then utilizes these two factorized matrices to
based CF, use the user rating data to calculate the similarity
between users or items and make predictions according to the
calculated similar ratings [3], [4]. For the easy-to-implement
and highly effective, memory-based CF methods are notably
deployed into many commercial systems. When the user
feedback information is sparse, the performance of memory-
based CF methods deteriorates drastically since the similarity
is based on co-rated items. To overcome sparsity problem,
model-based CF methods have been investigated, which use
the pure rating data (a.k.a. user feedback information) to learn
a model for predictions [5], [3]. Most of these methods rely on
matrix factorization (MF), which factorizes the user-item rat-
ing matrix into two low-rank user-specific and item-specific

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C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
make further predictions [3]. It is effective but not enough
since dimensionality reduction usually means losing useful
information. Especially for large-scale sparse data, to achieve
high-density factorized matrices, the ranks should be much
lower, and hence more information is lost. Besides, Simple
MF on pure rating matrix cannot handler cold-start problem.
With the rapid development of web services, various kinds
of auxiliary information (a.k.a. side information) become
valuable for recommender systems [6]. Although auxiliary
information has been demonstrated useful to deal with data
sparsity and cold-start problems, it is difficult to model and
explore them. Generally, current methods that integrate side
information can be divided into 3 categories: (1) factoriza-
tion machine (FM) models [7]; (2) CF-based models [8];
(3) deep learning models [9]. FM models usually utilize one-
hot or multi-hot coding technique to model auxiliary infor-
mation. Although some modified methods adopt embedding
layer in a neural network-based FM framework, the models
still too complex to learn due to the high-dimension feature
vectors. The following 2 methods usually adopt HIN to char-
acterize more useful auxiliary information in recommender
systems due to its flexibility in modelling data heterogeneity.
To extract useful knowledge from HINs, most of existing
methods rely on meta path and graph embedding. However,
both of them cannot fully mine latent structure and semantic
features for users and items. First, meta path which is usually
utilized to measure the user or item similarities on HINs, is a
kind of local metric, e.g., PathSim [10] only explores the
symmetric meta path instances in HINs. Meanwhile, graph
embedding technique essentially uses a low-dimension latent
vector to model the object structure in HINs, and information
loss is inevitable. Further, all these three kinds of learning
approaches suffer expensive model-building problem, and are
hardly deployed in complex scenarios, especially with many
various side information. Another issue of them is that they
all create a global object function to optimize the parameters
of latent factors. Thus, they cannot learn the personalized
latent factor well. For example, When CF models learn the
latent vectors U, V, for a specific user i, Ui depends on all
his historical information; for a specific item j, Uj relies on
all its rated scores. That is to say the special behaviors are
easy to overlook, e.g., if we find user i usually likes action
movie, the learned model will think any action movie may
be favorite and completely ignore that he may dislike some
action ones due to other reasons. In FM or deep learning
models, this problem still exists, i.e., the parament of a feature
or feature interaction is subject to the global optimization
and hardly handle special cases. In conclusion, in order to
improve the recommendation performance via various kinds
of side information, there are 3 challenging issues, namely
effective data model, information extraction and exploitation.
For the first issue, we still use HIN to model both the user
behavior information (e.g., buy, watch and rate) and auxiliary
information, named as Unified Graph. Then, we propose
Graph Filtering (GF) for prediction in this paper that says,
‘‘the predicted score for a given rating behavior depends on
VOLUME 8, 2020
its similar rating behaviors.’’ To extract similarities between
user behaviors, we first use rate pairs to represent user behav-
iors, and then we propose Constrained SimRank (CSR) to
measure the rate pair similarities on the unified graph. CSR,
an extended form of SimRank [23] on HINs, is aware of the
semantics and signed values (e.g., rating score, like or dislike)
of different edges. Distinct from meta path-based measures,
CSR is a global similarity measure on HINs and can easily
integrate temporal information. To predicting the score of
a rate pair, we explore the weighted average value of all
its similar rate pairs. Effectively, our model is inspired by
the memory-based CF method, but we expand the scope of
similar objects via link-based CSR. Finally, we also create
an objective function for predication optimization with the
weighs of semantic edges as the paraments. Distinct from
other models, the paraments are very finite and they reflect
the semantic importance for our predication task more than
for concrete rating behaviors. Thus, it does not change our
recommendation intuition, i.e., special predicationspecial
similar rate pairs.
The primary contributions of this paper are as follow:
1) We study the problems in exploring various kinds of
auxiliary information for better recommendation, and
propose a novel case-to-case method, called Graph Fil-
tering, which predicts the rating score by similar rate
pairs on HIN that says, ‘‘the predicted score for a given
rating behavior depends on its similar rating behaviors.’’
2) In GF, a unified graph is proposed to model both user
behavior information and the side information. To mea-
sure the similarity of rate pair on the unified graph,
we design a semantic and sign value-aware similarity
measure, called Constrained SimRank.
3) We propose an adaptive optimization algorithm to
weight the contributions of different semantics on the
unified graph for our predication task.
4) We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate GF,
as well as other state-of-the-art baselines. The results
demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in
various sparse datasets.
II. INTRODUCTION
In the literature of recommender systems, early works mainly
focus on CF methods which utilize user historical feedback
information for prediction. Since traditional memory-based
CF methods usually suffer from data sparsity and cold-start
problems, some works attempt to leverage additional data,
such as social data [11]–[13], location information [14] and
context information [15] [28]. All the additional data is called
as auxiliary information. The classical methods that exploit
various kinds of auxiliary information to facilitate the data
sparsity and cold-start problems, can be grouped in three
categories: (1) factorization machine models; (2) matrix fac-
torization models; (3) deep learning models.
FMs are a general predicator working with any real valued
feature vectors. To explore the side data for recommendation,
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FMs first convert it into high-dimensional generic fea-
ture vectors by using one-hot/multi-hot encoding. Then, FMs
estimates the garget by modelling all interactions between
each pair of features via factorized interaction parameters.
Based on FMs, Xiang et al. propose neural FM (NFM) [16],
which seamlessly combines the linearity of FM in modeling
second-order feature interactions and the non-linearity of
neural network in modeling higher-order feature interactions.
Traditional MF models generally factorize the rating matrix
into two latent matrixes, i.e., U and V , by optimizing the
rate missing objective function. To improve the effectiveness
by exploiting the auxiliary information, many works rewrite
the objective function via adding a distance function about
the relationships among users and items [17]. With the surge
of deep learning, deep neural networks are also employed
to deeply capture the latent features of users and items for
recommendation, likely NCF [18], CFM [9], DeepFM [8],
NeuACF [9].
Since HINs can naturally model complex objects and their
rich relationships, some works have begun to adopt HIN in
recommendation. Specially, HINs are just utilized to model
data, and extracting information from HINs and exploring
them for recommendation are different problems. The two
usual technologies for information extraction are path-based
similarity measure [10], [19] and network embedding [20].
And the models that explore the extracted information from
HINs are either CFs or deep learning. In this paper, we still
employ HINs to model auxiliary information. Distinct from
above methods, we propose a novel similarity measure to
extract information and a case-to-case prediction method.
Comparing with traditional path-based similarity measures,
CSR is global, and GF can handle users’ special behaviors
for more personalized recommendation.
III. PRELIMINARY
In this section, we first introduce the basic preliminaries for
graph filtering recommendation, including notations and data
structures, and then formulates the problem. First, we give the
definition of HIN, and then propose a unified graph based
on HIN to model both user feedback information and the
complex auxiliary information.
Definition 1 (Information Network): An information net-
work is defined as a directed graph G = (V , E) where each
object v ∈ V belongs to one particular object type φ(v) ∈ V ,
and each link belongs to one particular relation ψ(e) = E.
If the types of objects |A| > 1 or the types of relations
|E| > 1, it is called heterogeneous information network;
otherwise, it is homogeneous information network.
In GF, the information that are modeled and explored for
prediction can be divided into 2 categories: user feedback
information, including ratings or other behaviors (e.g., buy,
watch, like) and auxiliary information, likely object attributes,
social relationships. First, the user feedback information is
modeled as a HIN GR = (V , E) which contains 2 object
types, i.e., A = {user, item}. If there is a rate from user
u to item i, a weighted edge e(u, i) is created with a rating
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C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
score. Then, we integrate the auxiliary information into GR .
In general, auxiliary information contains 2 types: structure
and attribute information. Structural information, represent-
ing object relations, can be model as edges in GR . Meanwhile,
the attribute information is a kind of appended information
to the corresponding objects that describe their features.
To model attribute data, denoted as 3, we create attribute
nodes and edges. For an attribute ai , if the value is discrete,
likely the movie genres in Fig. 1, we model each attribute
value ai,j (i.e., the jth value of) as a node and create an attribute
edge ea (v, ai,j ) if the node v has an attribute ai with value
ai,j ; if the value is continuous, e.g., user’s age, we segment
the value domain into discrete fragments. For each fragment,
we can create node and edge in GR same as discrete attribute.
Finally, we get a directed unified graph with the reverse edges
added. Fig. 1 shows an example of a unified graph for movie
recommendation where the users’ social relationship is a kind
of structural information, and the movie genre is an attribute
information. Particularly, an object may have more than one
values on a specific attribute, e.g., the genre of movie m1 can
be affection and comedy. We denote the unified graph as GU ,
and the formal definition is as follow.
Definition 2 (Unified Graph): Given a HIN GR = (VR , ER )
that represents the rating matrix R, various kinds of structure
information and attribute information, the Unified Graph,
denoted as GU = (VU , EU ) is a kind of complex HIN which
integrates the structure information via structure edges ES in
GR and the attribute information through creating attribute
nodes VA and attribute edges EA , i.e., EU = ER ∪ ES ∪ EA ,
VU = VR ∪ VA .
Further, we define the concept of rate pair on GU .
Definition 3 (Rate Pair): Rate pair is a two tuple about user
and item, denoted as r(u, i), u ∈ user, i ∈ item in GU . If there
is an edge between u and i, i.e., e(u, i) ∈ EU , r(u, i) is called
Feedback Rate Pair and the value is denoted as rui ; otherwise,
it’s Predicting Rate Pair, and the predated score of r(u, i) is
denoted as r̂ui .
IV. GRAPH FILTERING
A. INTUITION OF GRAPH FILTERING MODEL
Memory-based CF is a truly effective approach for most of
recommender systems except the data sparsity and cold-start
problems. The fundamental assumption of CF is that if user
u1 and u2 rate i items similarly, or have similar behaviors,
and hence rate or act on other items similarly. Since the
similarity measures of CF are usually based on co-relations
(e.g., cosine, Pearson coefficient), the similarity values are
unreliable when data are sparse [21]. Taking the rating matrix
in Fig.1 as an example, user u1 and u3 are entirely different
if we compute the similarity based on co-relations. However,
if we model the matrix as a HIN and use path-based similarity
measure, both u1 and u3 link to u4 . Hence, they have a certain
similarity. Then, if we rate the movie m5 for u1 , not only
the feedback information of u2 and u4 , but also the rating
value of u3 to m5 can be explored. Further, either user-based
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C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
FIGURE 1. Example of creating unified graph for movie recommendation based on rating matrix, user relationships and the movie genres.
FIGURE 2. Memory-based CF models and graph filtering model.
CF or item-based CF (i.e., two categories of memory-based
CF) only adopt one similar set for rating prediction, i.e., user
similar set or item similar set respectively, which is shown
in Fig. 2. However, a rating score is produced from two
objects: user and item. Thus, when we compute the predicated
ratings, we have more valuable rating values that can be
explored. These aspects are the main motivation of GF.
The basic intuition behind GF is that given a predicting
rate pair, the predicated value depends on the values of its
similar rate pairs. To overcome the limitations of memory-
based CF, we first model the known information as a unified
graph GU . Given a predicting rate pair r(u, i), we try to
find its similar feedback rate pairs via path-based similarity.
A straightforward way to measure the similarity between
rate pairs is to compute the similarities between correspond-
ing users and items. Comparing with the memory-based CF
methods, the final set of similar rate pairs can be divided
into 3 subsets: similar user set, similar item set and indirect
similar set. Fig. 2 shows the two memory-based CF models,
i.e., user-based CF and item-based CF. To compute r̂ui of the
predicting rate pair r(u, i), the user-based CF, (i.e., Fig. 2 (a)),
firstly finds the similar users of u and use their ratings to
item j as the relevant score for r̂ui . While, the item-based CF,
(i.e., Fig. 2(b)), firstly finds the similar items of i, and use the
ratings from u to the similar items as the reference for r̂ui .
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Distinct from memory-based CF models, GF model (i.e.,
Fig.2 (c)) computes r̂ui through global information over the
unified graph GU . First, we utilize path-based similarity on
GU to min more similar objects. Not only the rate pairs that
directly connects with the user u or item i via paths of GU , but
also the rate pairs referenced through similar users and similar
items are explored to compute r̂ui . We denote the similar user
set of the user u as SUu , the similar item set of the item i as SIi .
And the union set of SUu and SIi is called Direct Similar Set,
denoted as DSS, while the rate pair set, a Cartesian product
of users in SUu and items in SIi , is called Indirect Similar
Set, denoted as inDSS. Every element in the 3 sets should be
feedback rate pair. For example, in Fig. 1, if we predicate the
value of the rate pair (u1 , m5 ), the similar user set is {(u2 , m5 ),
(u3 , m5 ), (u4 , m5 )}, the similar item set is {(u1 , m1 ), (u1 , m2 ),
(u1 , m3 )} and the indirect similar set is {(u2 , m1 ), (u2 , m2 ),
(u3 , m3 ), (u4 , m1 ), (u4 , m2 ), (u4 , m3 )}. We use the following
formulas to introduce the relations between memory-based
CF and GF.
Memory-based CF model is formulized as
 P

 rvi user based CF
v∈SUu
r̂ui ∝ P (1)

 rui item based CF
j∈SIi
GF model is formulized as
X X X
r̂ui ∝ rvi + ruj + rvj (2)
v∈SUu j∈SIi r(v,j)∈inDSS
where rvj is the value of rate pairs in inDSS.
B. BASIC GRAPH FILTERING EQUATION
Given two rate pairs r(u, i), r(v, j), let s[(u, i), (v, j)] be the
similarity between them. If u = v or i = j, the similarity can
be simplified as s(i, j) or s(u, v). For example, if one user u
has rated two different items i and j, the distance between the
two rata pairs only relies on the items. Following our earlier
intuition that the value of a predicting rate pair depends on its
similar rate pairs, the predicated rate value is computed as a
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 C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN

weight sum of his similar rate pair scores. Based on Eq. (2), Let s(∗ ,∗ ) satisfy self-maximum. If i = j, i.e., the two
we write our basic equation for r̂ui : different users rate the same item, we only need to weight the
|SU similarity between the users; if u = v, i.e., one user rates two
Xu | |SIi | |SU
Xu | X
|SIi |
different items, only the distance between the items need to
X
r̂ui = s̃(u, v)rvi + s̃(i, j)ruj + s̃[(u, i), (v, j)]rvj
v=1 j=1 v=1 j=1
be measure; otherwise, we use the produce of the 2 similarity
(3) values. Therefore, the factorization in Eq. (7) can meet the
form of our basic GF equation (3).
where s̃ represents the normalize value of the corresponding In conclusion, to compute s[(u, i), (v, j)] in GU , we only
rate pair similarity s, which can be computed by need to design a path-based object similarity measure s(∗ ,∗ )
s[(u, i), (v, j)] which should be self-maximum and aware of the sign values
s̃[(u, i), (v, j)] = (4) and edge semantics. In this paper, we propose Constrained
Norm(u, i)
SimRank (CSR), an extended form of SimRank on HINs.
where Norm(u, i) is the sum of the similarity distances from SimRank [22] is a state-of-art link-based similarity measure
r(u, i) to all its similar feedback rate pairs. If r(v, j) is a on homogeneous information network. It is introduced to
predicting rate pair, that’s to say rvj is unknown and it’s formally the intuition that ‘‘two objects are similar if they
useless for prediction. Therefore, when we compute r̂ui , the are referenced by similar objects.’’ Theoretically, SimRank
similarity value between r(u, i) to any other predicting rate is based on an intuitive ‘‘random surfer-pairs model’, and its
pair is set to be 0. score of node pair u and v, s(u, v), specifies how soon two
Let Uu = SUu ∪ {u}, Ii = SIi ∪ {i}. Then, the Eq. (3) can random surfers are expected to meet at same node if they start
be uniformly written as at nodes u and v and randomly walk on the graph. If u = v,
|Uu | X
X |Ii | s(u, v) = 1; or
r̂ui = s̃[(u, i), (v, j)]rvj (5) |0(u)|
v=1 j=1 c X |0(v)|
X
s(u, v) = s(0i (v), 0j (v)) (8)
Further, considering the personalized rating bias of each |0(u)| |0(v)|
i=1 j=1
user, we extend Eq. (5) into
where 0 < c < 1 is the decay factor, 0(∗ ) is the neighbor
|Uu | X
X |Ii |
(in or out) set of ∗ , and 0i (∗ ) is the ith element. SimRank is
r̂ui = r̄u + s̃[(u, i), (v, j)](rvj − r̄v ) (6) not designed for HINs. Thus, it is unaware of semantics and
v=1 j=1 sign values. If we use SimRank on GU , a more complex HIN,
where r̄u and r̄v are the average rating scores for the user u these two questions should be considered. Before we answer
and v on all their rated items. them, the network schema of GU is given, and based on the
schema, we propose our CSR on GU .
C. CONSTRAINED SIMRANK
Given the basic GF equation, the next problem is to design a
rate pair similarity that meet the following conditions:
• Given a unified graph GU , the similarity measure in GF
should be path-based, which can min more latent similar
rate pairs in GU .
• Since GU is a complex HIN with various semantic edges,
the path-based measure should be semantic-aware.
• In some scenarios, the user’s feedback information is
a 1 and 0 matrix where 1 represents ‘‘like’’; ‘‘watch’’,
‘‘buy’’ and so on; otherwise, it is 0. While, in other sce-
narios, the user’s feedback information are continuous
FIGURE 3. The network schema of GU for recommendation.
scores in a specific domain. We call these ratings sign
values, and our similarity should be sign-aware, that
means similar ratings lead to similar rate pairs. Network schema is a meta template for HINs with the
object and link mapping to their types and directed relation
Given GU , it is difficult to measure the rate pair similarity
edges respectively [10]. Fig. 3 is the network schema of GU ,
since all the path-based measures are designed for two nodes
and m, n be the attribute number of user and item. There are
to our best knowledge. If the two rate pairs share the same
Z (Z = m + n + 3) kinds of sematic relations in GU . If we run
item or users, the rate pair similarity can be detailly written
SimRank on GU to compute the similarity directly, there may
as a distance between two users or items. In this perspective,
exist Z kinds of semantic edges in a path. Assume that u and v
we can measure the rate pair similarity by the two similarities
are two users in GU , based on SimRank, they randomly walk
between their corresponding users and items, i.e.,
forward and meet at the same node j in k th step. However,
s[(u, i), (v, j)] = s(u, v)s(i, j) (7) the two paths u to j and v to j may completely different in

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C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN

semantic. For example, there are two paths: path(u-ua1,x -j) the first step is to their out-neighbors Ok ((u, v)) of Ak , i.e., ta :
and path(v-ua2,y -j) on GU . Based on SimRank, s(u, v) should u → Ak,i (u) x and tb : v → Ak,j (v) x. Then,
be higher since u and v will meet in second step on their the tours from (Ak,i (u), Ak,j (v)) to the node x is denoted as t 0 .
random surfer. Concretely, if u shares the same job with j and For each t we can derive a corresponding t 0 by splitting the
v shares the same age with j, can we infer that u and v are of edge e((u, v), (Ak,i (u), Ak,j (v))) at the beginning in G2 . And
a certain similarity? corresponding to the path instance t and t 0 , we derive meta
Obviously, similarity only exist between objects of the path T 0 from T where T 0 : Ak A(x) by splitting the meta
same class and should be computed by comparing their cor- edge (A(u), Ak ) in TG . We use Au,v to denote the bijection that
responding related objects of the same type. Based on this takes each T 0 from T via Ak . Then, we get
intuition, we propose Constrained SimRank in which the
pairwise random surfer go to the next step only if the next m(u, v)
X X
two nodes belong to the same class. Given GU , u, v ∈ Ai . = P[t]cl(t)
If u = v, s(u, v) = 1; otherwise, s(u, v) is T : Ai Aj t = ta ||tb
|X
Tu,v ||0t (u)||0t (v)| A ⊆ TG ta , tb ∈ T
c X X
s(u, v) = s(0t,i (v), 0t,j (v)) (9) |X
Au,v | |Ok (u,v)|
|0(u)| |0(v)| X X X
t=1 i=1 j=1 =
where Tu,v is a node class set for the neighbor nodes of u and AkAk,i (u) T 0 : Ak φ(x) t 0 = ta0 ||tb0
v, 0t (u) are the u’ neighbors of type At , and 0t,i (u) is the ith Ak,j (v) A ⊆ TG ta0 , tb0 ∈ T
element, i.e., φ(0t,i (u)) = At ∈ Tu,v . For example, u and v 1 0
are two users. Then we have φ(0t,i (u)) ≡ φ(0t,j (v)). Based × P[t 0 ]cl(t )+1
|O(u)| |O(v)|
on Fig. 3, (φ(0t,i (u)), φ(0t,j (v)) in the right hand of Eq. (9)
|X
Au,v | |Ok (u,v)|
may be (user, user), (ua1 , ua1 ). . . (uam , uam ) and (item, item). c X X X
Theorem 1: The Constrained SimRank score on HINs, =
|O(u)| |O(v)|
defined in Eq. (9), is semantic-aware. Ak A (u) T 0 : A
k,i k φ(x) t 0 = ta0 ||tb0
Proof: SimRank is based on ‘‘random surfer-pairs Ak,j (v) A ⊆ TG ta0 , tb0 ∈ T
model’’ on graph, and the equivalent form of Eq. (8) is 0
× P[t 0 ]cl(t )
X
s(u, v) = P[t]cl(t) (10) Au,v | |Ak,i (u)| |Ak,j (v)|
|X
c X X
t:(u,v) (x,x) = m(Ak,i (u), Ak,j (v))
|O(u)| |O(v)|
k=1 i=1 j=1
Specially, Eq. (10) is defined on G2 . Given a graph G, G2 is
a HIN where each node represents an ordered node pair of G,
Therefore, Eq. (11) is identical to Eq. (9) of CSR. Further,
and (a, b) points to (c, d) in G2 if a points to c and b points to
given a meeting path t of Eq. (11), t = ta ||tb , ta : a1 am ,
in G. Each tour in G2 is composed by 2 same-length paths in
tb : b1 bm , since φ(ai ) = φ(bi ), we have
G: ta : u x and tb : v x. P[t] is the traveling probability
and l(t) is the length of t. Here we use two paths in step on R(φ(ai−1 ), φ(ai )) = R(φ(bi−1 ), φ(bi )), 1 < i ≤ m.
G to instead t, formally written as t = ta ||tb . We will prove
that CSR is also based on ‘‘random surfer-pairs model’’. And R denotes the edge semantics, and hence ta and tb are seman-
then, we can infer that ta and tb are semantic consistent in any tic consistent in any step. Finally, we can infer that the CSR
step for any t. score of Eq. (9) is semantic aware. 
For our GSR, we extend the concept of expected meeting Given the basic form of CSR, the following question is how
distance (EMD) into constrained expected meeting distance to integrate the sign values of GU into Eq. (9). In GU , the sign
(CEMD). The similarity between u and v of same type in G values only exist in the relationships (user, item) or (item,
based on CEMD is user). The sign values can be classified into 2 types: (1)
X X discrete values (e.g., like, watch, buy); (2) continuous values,
m(u, v) = P[t]cl(t) (11)
likely rating scores. We design a function f to weight the
T : Ai Aj t : (u, v) (x, x) similarity between the sign values. Suppose that xt,i is the
A ⊆ TG t∈T sign value of the edge e(u, 0t,i (u)), and yt,j be the sign value
where TG is the network schema of G. of e(v, 0t,j (v)). Based on the definition of CSR, the values of
First, if u = v, m(u, v) = s(u, v) = 1 since l(t) = 0. If there e(u, 0t,i (u)) and e(v, 0t,j (v)) must belong to the same type.
is no path t from (u, v) to any singleton nodes, i.e., there is no If the edges have no sign value, f (xt,i , yt,j ) = 1; else if they
same-length paths ta : u x and tb : v x of the same belong to discrete values, the f function is
meta path, m(u, v) = 0, it’s easy to see that s(u, v) = 0 from (
1 if xt,i = yt,j
Eq. (9) since no similarity would flow to (u, v). Otherwise, f (xt,j , yt,j ) = (12)
consider the tours from (u, v) to a singleton node x in which 0 otherwise

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This ensure that only the edges of the same sign value lead
to similarity. For example, if user u and v both like or dislike
item i, we will say that u and v are similar. However, if u
likes i; meanwhile, v dislikes i, u and v are not similar in the
perspective of item i, even they have a high similar score in
structure of GU . Then, if the values of the signed edges are
continuous, we compute f via an exponential function,
C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
can be reached by iteration to a fixed point. Given GU , for
each Ai ∈ A, we use Ni to denote the number of nodes belong
to Ai , and create Ni2 entries S(∗ ,∗ ) of length Ni2 . For each iter-
P|A|
ation, we can keep i=1 Ni2 entries S k (∗ ,∗ ), where S k (a, b)
gives the score between a and b on k th iteration. S k+1 (∗ ,∗ )
can be computed based on S k (∗ ,∗ ) with start at S 0 (∗ ,∗ ). Each
S 0 (a, b) is a lower bound on Constrained SimRank score
f (xt,i , yt,j ) = exp(−λ xt,i , yt,j )

(13)
where λ is to control the effectiveness of sign values.
In GU , various semantic edges have different contributions
for the similarity computation and further rating prediction.
Let R(Ai , Aj ) be a semantic edge in TG . Obviously, we have
R(Ai , Aj ) = R(Aj , Ai ) since they share the same semantic.
We use W to denote the semantic edge weights in Fig. (3),
and the final CSR score is
|X
Tu,v | |0X
t (u)| |0 t (v)|
c X
s(u, v) = wt
|0(u)| |0(v)|
t=1 i=1 j=1
× f (xt,i , yt,j )s(0t,i (v), 0t,j (v)) (14)
is one dimension of W , W = (w1 , w2 , . . . , wZ ), and
where wtP
wt > 0, Zt=1 wt = Z .
D. RATE PAIR SIMILARITY
Given GU , we can computer the rate pair similarity based
on Eq. (7) and Eq. (14). In this section, we introduce the
computation of rate pair similarity. Before that, some good
properties of our rate pair similarity for GF model are shown
in Theorem 2.
Theorem 2: (Properties of Rate Pair Similarity):
1) Symmetric: s[(u, i), (v, j)] = s[(v, j), (u, i)];
2) Self-maximum with W = 1.0: s[(u, i), (v, j)] ∈ [0, 1]
and s[(u, i), (u, i)] = 1;
3) Awareness of sign value. Let au,i , bv,j be the sign value
of r(u, i), r(v, j). Then, s[(u, i), (v, j)] ∝ f (au,i , bv,j ).
Proof: These properties can be easily proved based on
our definitions.
Since s(u, i)s(v, j) = s(v, j)s(u, i), we can infer that rate pair
similarity is symmetric according to Eq. (7).
The domain of SimRank is [0, 1]. Let u, v be two nodes
in G. If there is not any path between them, the SimRank
value is 0; else, if u = v, it’s 1; otherwise SimRank score
belongs to (0, 1). Based on Eq. (14), CSR score is no bigger
than SimRank in the same case. And it also can be 0 or 1 in
the same condition as SimRank. Based on Eq. (7), the rate
pair similarity is self-maximum with a domain [0, 1].
Based on Eq. (14), user similarity partially relies on item
similarity, and item similarity partially depends on users.
Thus, s(u, v) ∝ f (xu,i , yv,j ) and s(i, j) ∝ f (xi,u , yj,v ). Since
au,i = xu,i = xi,u and bv,j = xv,j = xj,v , based on Eq. (7),
we have s[(u, i), (v, j)] ∝ f (au,i , bv,j ).
Beside these properties, we can also infer that the rate pair
similarity is semantic-aware based on Theorem 1.
To computer the rate pair similarity is to figure Eq. (14) of
CSR. Inspired by SimRank, the solution to the CSR equation
52878
s(a, b):
(
0
S (a, b) =
0 if a 6 = b
(15)
1 if a = b
To computer S k+1 (∗ ,∗ ), base on Eq. (14), we get:
(
k+1 sk (a, b) if a 6 = b
S (a, b) = (16)
1 if a = b
On each (k + 1)th iteration, we update the similarity score
of (a, b) using the scores of its neighbors from the previous
iteration k. Since the values S k (a, b), as the k th increase,
is nondecreasing and has an upper limit 1, it will converges,
i.e., for any pair (a, b), a, b ∈ VU in GU = (VU , EU ), we can
infer that limk→∞ S k (a, b) = s(a, b).
Let b = max{Ni2 }. To computing Rate Pair Similarity, the
space required is O(Zb2 ) to store the results S k (∗ ,∗ ). The time
required is the same as SimRank. Further, suppose d̄ is the
average value of |0(∗ )| |0(∗ )| over GU , the required time is
O(kZb2 d̄). In our experiments, we set the precision of GSR
calculation 10−5 , and we have seen that the final score will
stabilize within 9 iterations, i.e., k ≤ 9.
Furthermore, the rate pair profile also retains the temporal
information. The behaviors in a long time ago may have few
influences on recent behaviors. We incorporate the temporal
information of rate pair in GF by adding a time-based weight
and the predictions, weighted by the time-based parameter,
for the ratings are computed as follows [23]:
P|Uu | P|Ii | 0
v=1 j=1 s [(u, i), (v, j)](rvj − r̄v )
r̂ui = r̄u + P|Uu | P|Ii | 0 (17)
v=1 j=1 s [(u, i), (v, j)]
where s0 [(u, i), (v, j)] is the time-aware rate pair similarity of
r(u, i) and r(v, j), computed by
s0 [(u, i), (v, j)] = s[(u, i), (v, j)]e−α(du,i −dv,j ) (18)
Note that the prediction has a time-based relevance factor
exp(−α(du,i − dv,j )) with a decaying rate controlled by the
parameter α. Here, dv,j denotes the timestep when user v rated
the item j [24].
E. GF BASED RECOMMENDATION
Given GU , we can easily predict rating scores as memory-
based CF based on Eq. (7) and Eq. (17) except the parament
 W . To compute W , we propose a self-adjust method that
optimizes W and predicts rating scores though an iterative
process:
1) Let W t be the weight parament of semantic relations in
the ith iteration. Initialize W 0 with w0i = 1, 1 ≤ i ≤ Z .
VOLUME 8, 2020
C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
2) Given GU and W t , compute r̂ based on Eq. (17).
3) Recompute the rating scores r̃ of feedback rate pairs
based on r and r̂. Weight the differences between r and
its recomputed score r̃ through an objective function
O(W , r, r̃).
4) Get W t+1 through optimizing O(W , r, r̃).
5) Repeat until the convergence of the parament W and r̂.
In this section, we firstly built an objective function. Then,
we propose a vote mechanism to compute the paraments, and
the GF-based recommendation algorithm is given at last.
1) OBJECTIVE FUNCTION
One precondition for our GF model to effectively predict is
that the outputs should be close to the feedback rating scores
if we use GF to recompute the rating matrix. Suppose that
rating matrix is denoted as R. If r(u, i) is a feedback rate pair,
R(u, i) = rui ; or R(u, i) = null. Given GU and W , GF can
complete R, denoted as R̂. Based on R̂, we can get r̃ui by
P|Uu | P|Ii | 0
j=1 s [(u, i), (v, j)](R(v, j) − r̄v )
r̃ui = r̄u +
v=1
(19)
P|Uu | P|Ii | 0
j=1 s [(u, i), (v, j)]
v=1
Based on the recomputed values of feedback rate pairs,
we can use the missing ratings as the objective function of
GF.
Definition 4 (Graph Filtering Objective Function): Given
GU , the weights W of semantic relations and rating matrix
R, the goal of GF-based recommendation is to compute the
value r̂ for each predicating rate pair which complements R
as R̂, so that the following objective function is minimized
X positive number δ to make Eq. (22) is greater than 0 when
O({r̂ui }, W ) = (rvj − r̃vj )2 ,
r(v,j)∈FRP
XZ
s.t. 0 < wi < Z and wi = Z (20)
i=1
where FRP is the set of all feedback rate pairs in GU .
2) SELF-ADJUSTIVE SOLUTION
The Eq. (20) is too complex to figure out for the polynomial
denominators about W in Eq. (17). Hence, we propose an
approximate solution that is to set a constant norm. For each
predicting rate pair r(u, i), we choose top kui most similar rate
pairs. Let r(u, i)(k) be the k th similar rate pair of r(u, i), and
the top kui most similar rate pairs should subject to:
kui
X type, a majority vote mechanism is design. In GF framework,
s0 [(u, i), (u, i)(k) ] ≤ norm
k=1
ui +1
kX
s [(u, i), (u, i)(k+1) ] > norm
0
k=1
The constant norm plays an important role our GF model.
It determines how many feedback rate pairs are similar to the
target predicting rate pair and further utilized for prediction.
Given GU , based on CSR, highly concentrated rate pairs may
have more similar rate pairs with high scores. While most of
the rate pairs have few similar rate pairs with high similar
VOLUME 8, 2020
scores. Considering the sparsity problem, GF desires more
similar rate pairs for prediction. Assume that
|Uu | X
|Ii |
χ = min{
X
s0 [(u, i), (v, j)] |r(u, i) ∈ PRP }
v=1 j=1
where PRP is the set of all predicting rate pairs in GU . Further,
we set norm = 0.85χ .
Theorem 3: Given GU and norm, there exists a unique solu-
tion about W ∗ = (w∗1 , . . . , w∗Z ) that minimize the objective
function in Eq. (20) except that all users’ rate scores in the
rating matrix are the same.
Proof: Taking Eq. (17) and Eq. (19) with a given norm
into the objective function, we can infer that Eq. (20) is a
polynomial function of multi-variable W with non-negative
real coefficients. Assume that the polynomial expression of
wi in Eq. (20) is denoted as fi (wi ). Then the Lagrange form of
Eq. (20) is
Z
X X
O0 ({r̂u,i }, W , λ) = fi (wi ) + λ( wi − Z ) (21)
i=1 i
The partial derivative functions of Eq. (21) are
∂O0 ∂fi (wi )
= + λ + b = 0, (1 ≤ i ≤ m) (22)
∂wi ∂wi
Based on Gauss’ Fundamental Theorem of Algebra [25],
Eq. (22) has at least one complex root. Assume λ = λ∗ .
When λ ≥ −b, there are no real number solution to Eq. (22).
Considering the condition λ < −b, there must be at least one
w∗i = δ . Since Eq. (22) is continuous in the real interval
(0, δ), there must be at least one solution in (0, δ).
Therefore, there also is a unique positive root which max-
imizes the objective function in Eq. (20). 
Given a norm in Eq. (17), minimizing the objective func-
tion is a linear programming problem. Thus, an adaptive
adjustment method is proposed to iteratively improve W .
First, we initialize W 0 with 1.0, and iteratively adjust wti with
an increment 1wti . Then, the weight wi in the (t+1)th iteration
is computed by
1 t
wt+1 = (w + 1wti ) (23)
i
2 i
To accurately determine the increment 1w for each edge
we use rate scores r to predict r̂ and recompute r as r̃ based on
r̂. Due to the symmetry of the similarity, if a feedback rate pair
r(v, j) has a high similarity to the predicating rate pair r(u, i),
r̂ui will play a high important role for the re-computation of
r̃vj . That’s to say, r̂ and r will be closer if their corresponding
rate pairs are more similar. Further, to minimize the distance
between rvj and r̃vj , where r(v, j) has a strong influence on
r(u, i) and r̃vj is computed through r̂ui , we should improve
the similarity s[(u, i), (v, j)].
Suppose r(v, j) belongs to the top kui similar rate pair set of
r(u, i). If we improve the similarity s[(u, i), (v, j)], r̃vj will be
52879

close to rvj . Therefore, to approximate the objective function,
we should maximize the closeness of the similarity set for
each predicating rate pair. The rate pair similarity can be
improved from 2 aspects: user and item. If a kind of semantic
edge can improve the similarity of users or items in a simi-
larity set, the weight of this semantic edge should be higher.
Further, a vote mechanism is designed as follow: for each
predicating rate pair r(u, i), let Uut and Iit be the similar set
of user u and item i in t th iteration with self-include. If a large
portion of vertices within Uut share the same neighbor node of
a certain type Ak , it means that the semantic edge R(user, Ak )
has a good property for the similarity between nodes in Uut .
Suppose that vp and vq are two users in Uut or items in Iit ,
we design a vote measure to determine whether two vertices
share the same neighbors:
( 7. Recompute r̃vj based on Eq. (19).
1 vp 6 = vq , ∃e(vp , a), e(vq , a), a ∈ Ak
votek (vp , vq ) = (24)
0 otherwise
Since R(Ai , Aj ) and R(Aj , Ai ) share the same weight, we
only focus on the weight w of semantic relation in the form
of R(user, Ak ) or R(item, Ak ) in TG (i.e., Fig. 3). Then 1wti is
estimated by counting the number of vertices which share the
same neighbor of Ak within Uut or Iit for all predicating rate
pairs in t th iteration.
If the nodes of Ak only connect to user nodes, and wk is the
weight of R(user, Ak ), the count function for 1wtk is
X |Uu| X
X |Uu|
hu (Ak , t) = votek (vp , vq )
r(u,i)∈PRP p=1 q=1
If the nodes of Ak only connect to item nodes, and wk is
about R(item, Ak ), the count function of 1wtk is
X |Ii| X
X |Ii|
hi (Ak , t) = votek (vp , vq )
r(u,i)∈PRP p=1 q=1
If wk is the weight of R(user, item), the count function is
1
hui = (hu (item, t) + hi (user, t))
2 1) AMAZON
Finally, based on Fig. 3, 1wtk is computed by
h(Ak , t)
1wtk = m n
hu (Ak , t) + hi (Ak , t) + hui
P P
k=1 k=1
3) GRAPH FILTERING ALGORITHM
For clarity, we show the steps of GF-based recommendation
in Algorithm 1.
For graph filtering, the required space is the same to store
S k (∗ ,∗ ) and R̂ that are the same as CSR. Each iteration of GF
contains 3 part: (1) CSR computation; (2) predicting the score
for each rate pair; (3) weight adjustment. The required time
of prediction O(b2 ). Let d̃ be the average of the inner product
for Uu or Ii , and the time complexity of weight adjustment is
O(b2 d̃).
52880
C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
INPUT: RATING MATRIX RM ∗ N , ATTRIBUTES OF
USERS {UAm }, ATTRIBUTES OF ITEMS {IAn }, USER
RELATIONSHIP URM ∗ M , ITEM RELATIONS IRN ∗ N ,
AND NORM.
OUTPUT:{r̂ui }
1. Built the unified graph GU .
2. Initialize W 0 , wi = 1, i = 1, . . . , Z .
REPEAT
3. Run Constrained SimRank on GU .
4. For each predicating rate pair r(u, i):
Compute similarities between r(u, i) and other rate
pairs based on Eq. (18).
Find top kui most similar feedback rate pairs.
5. Computer r̂ui based on Eq. (17) with norm.
6. Complete R as R̂.
8. Create the objective function in Eq. (20).
9. Update W based on Eq. (24) ∼ (28).
END UNTIL THE OBJECTIVE FUNCTION CON-
VERGES.
10. Output {r̂ui }.
Suppose H = max{O(kZb2 d̄), O(b2 d̃)}. Then, the time
complexity of GF is O(KH ) where K is the outer iteration
number. Detailly, in CSR computation, d̄ depends on the
average of node degree of GU . Meanwhile, d̃ relies on norm
to select the similar rate pairs. Generally, d̃ > d̄ since the
(25) number of similar rate pairs searched from whole GU via
paths is usually bigger than the average of node degree. In our
experiment, we have seen that kZb2 d̄ < b2 d̃. That is to say
the time complexity of GF is O(Kb2 d̃). Further, our propose
method promises a high speed of convergence, and W will be
stable within 10 iterations.
(26)
V. EXPERIMENTS
A. DATASETS
We now provide an overview of the datasets.
(27)
We use two sets of the real traces from Amazon datasets:
movies and books. The period of extracted ratings is from
2012 till 2014. The movie dataset consists of 2.12M ratings
(28)
from 455,146 users for 156,923 movies with 41,253 directors,
58,8076 actors and 112 genres. The book dataset consists
of 3.52M ratings from 798,431 users for 482,879 books.
And the attributes include 231,452 authors, 51,812 publisher,
and 156 time-nodes. The ratings vary from 1 to 5 with an
increment of 1.
2) DOUBAN DATASET
We create one dataset from Douban about movie domain.
The Douban movie dataset includes 14,351 users and
13,822 movies with 1,193,845 ratings from 1 to 5. The users
are from 2,813 group and the attributes of movies consist
of 2,541 directors, 6753 actors and 38 genres.
VOLUME 8, 2020
C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
TABLE 1. Results of effectiveness experiments on three datasets.
We use the widely used Root Mean Square Error (RMSE)
and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) to
measure the performance of the recommendation methods.
B. BASELINES
We consider two kinds of recommendation methods: ones
only utilizing implicit feedback and others utilizing auxiliary
information. The comparisons are given as following:
1) ItemKNN [21] is a classical memory-based approach
that computes the cosine item similarity to provide rec-
ommendation.
2) MF [3] is a standard factorization method to exploit the
rating matrix for prediction.
3) Collaborative Memory Network (CMN) [26] is a deep
architecture to unify MCF and latent factor model to
explore user behaviors.
4) SVD++ is a variant of SVDFeature which utilized the
meta-path2vec++ [27] embedding method to extract
user and item embeddings as features for SVDFeature.
5) NFM combines the linearity of FM and the non-linearity
of neural network for modeling higher-order feature
interactions [16].
6) HERec [6] exploits auxiliary information based on graph
embedding and then utilizes non-linear fusion function
to integrate the embedded information into MF model.
7) NeuACF extracts different aspect-level similarities of
users and items through different meta paths and feeds a
neural network to learn latent factors [9].
Among these methods, we set the number of latent factors
to 10 for MF. HIN-based methods need to specify meta paths.
Following [10], we only select short meta paths of at most 4
steps. For the deep learning architectures, likely CMN, NFM
and NeuACF, we design 4 layers uniformly. Other baseline
parameters adopt the original optimal setting.
C. OVERALL RECOMMENDATION EFFECTIVENESS
For each dataset, we split the entire rating information into
a training set and a test set, with the training ratios as
VOLUME 8, 2020
in {80%, 60%, 40%}. Obviously, smaller ratio means much
sparser data for recommendation, and the capability of han-
dling sparsity problem is test.
Table 1 lists results of GF along with the baselines for
RMSE on all left test data and NDCG with cut offs at 10.
The major findings are summarized as follows:
1) All these models are sensitive to data size and spar-
sity. With the increases of training ratio, the metric
results improve significantly. Among all these baselines,
the methods that utilize heterogeneous information per-
form better than pure CFs, including ItemKNN, MF
and CMN. It indicates that exploiting auxiliary data can
partly overcome the data sparsity problem.
2) The proposed GF method is better than the baselines
in most instances. Only in Douban dataset with 80%
training ratio, HERec performs better than GF. Compar-
ing with traditional HIN based methods, which directly
exploit and model various kinds of auxiliary data via
meta paths or network embedding, GF not only exploits
the auxiliary data, but also learns the weights of different
semantic relations among them for prediction. More
clearly, baselines first exploit the auxiliary data, and
then learn models subject to the exploited information.
Meanwhile, GF exploits auxiliary data and learns model
in an iterative framework. Comparing with meta path
in NeuACF and embedding in HERec, CSR in GF can
exploit the auxiliary data more effectively.
3) Comparing with Douban dataset, Amazon datasets are
large-scale with millions of relations. Most of baselines
work better in Douban dataset than the Amazon datasets.
An intuitive explanation is that more information is
lost when learning the latent features for each object in
large-scale sparse dataset. While, due to its case-to-case
design, GF work well in all these datasets. Furthermore,
with the decline of training ratio, the datasets become
much sparser, and the RMSE score of GF increase about
30% at most, and the NDCG score falls about 10%,
which demonstrates the effectiveness of GF in handling
sparsity data.
52881

D. DETAILED ANALYSIS OF GF MODEL
1) SELF COMPARISON
In this section, we study the effectiveness of the sign value
function and edge weight in GF, and two comparisons are
designed. For the sign value function, the comparison runs
CSR on GU with f (xt,i , yt,j ) = 1 in Eq. (14), denoted as GFS.
For the edge weight factor, the comparison predicts directly
through Eq. (17) with wi = 1, 1 ≤ i ≤ Z , denoted as GFW.
The test ratio is 20%, and the results on 3 datasets are shown
in Fig. 4.
FIGURE 4. The performances of self-comparisons.
We can see that GF consistently performs better than GFS
and GFW, which proves that sign value information is useful
for prediction and weighting semantic relations of GU is
meaningful. Further, comparing with GFW, GFS performs
better. An intuitive explanation is that semantic information
is more important than sign values, or our proposed iterative
GF algorithm is effective to achieve a global solution through
the objective function.
2) TEMPORAL FACTOR
In this part, we study the temporal effect of user. Logical time
corresponding to the actual timestamp of a rating event is used
to model the temporal information. We leverage GF and tune
the temporal parameter accordingly. The results are shown
in Fig. 5.
Based on Eq. (18), if α = 0, it means no temporal
information is considered in GF. First, Fig. 5 demonstrates
the temporal factor do have influence for rating prediction.
Then, this factor effect where varies between 0 to 0.3. Due to
the sparsity of dataset, further amplification of impacts the
predictions negatively as it reduces the contribution of old
ratings. We provide the optimally tuned parameter for our
experiments, shown in Table 1.
3) SCALABILITY
In this section, we study the scalability of the proposed GF
model. The parameter W according to semantic edges is the
central factor that effect the model scalability. Through our
experiment, in movie recommendation, the top 3 important
semantic relations are R(user, movie), R(movie, actor), and
R(movie, genre). We observe the two parameters in different
training ratios. The results are shown in Fig. 6.
The values of the parameters W are always in a small
domain. It demonstrates GF can learn an approximate optimal
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C. Zhang, X. Hong: Graph Filtering for Recommendation on HIN
FIGURE 5. The performance corresponding to temporal factor at 80%
training ratio.
FIGURE 6. The weights of most important semantic relations at different
datasets and training ratios.
prediction model, even when the dataset is very sparse. Fur-
thermore, we can infer that for a new user or item in GU
(i.e., cold-start problem), GF can predict the rating score by
Eq. (17) without re-learning W .
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we study the problems in exploiting auxiliary
information for sparsity recommendation. The process of cur-
rent methods can be divided into three stages: model, extrac-
tion and exploration. In extraction stage, most of existing
approaches can not fully mine global structure and semantic
features of users and items. Further, these methods, extended
matrix factorization based model or deep learning model,
suffer expensive model-building problem and cannot treat
personal latent factors carefully due to their global objective
functions.
In this paper, we propose a graph filtering method based
on HIN for recommendation. GF predicts the rating that
says, ‘‘a predicted rating depends on its similar rating pairs.’’
Concretely, we design a cast-to-case prediction framework.
For a given predicting rate pair, we can search its similar
rate pair based on Constrained SimRank, a semantic and
sign value-aware similarity measure on HIN and compute the
predicting rate score via weighted average of all its similar
ratings. Further, an adaptive framework is proposed to learn
the weights of different semantic edges and products an
optimized predicted rating. Finally, experimental studies on
various real-world datasets demonstrate that GF is effective
to handler the sparsity issue of recommendation.
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CHUANYAN ZHANG was born in Binzhou,
Shandong, China, in 1985. He received the B.S.
and M.S. degrees in software engineering from
Shandong University, Jinan, China, in 2012, where
he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in com-
puter science and technology.
His research interests include machine learning,
data integration, cloud computation, and social
network analysis. He has taken part in several
research programs funded by NSFC and Key R&D
Projects from Shandong Province.
XIAOGUANG HONG was born in Jinan, China,
in 1964.
He was a Professor and Ph.D. supervisor.
He is currently working at the Software Col-
lege, Shandong University. His research inter-
ests include data integration, cloud computation,
database optimization, social network analysis,
and recommender systems. He has undertaken
many projects funded by NSFC and Key R&D
Projects from Shandong Province, and has pub-
lished many high-quality conference and journal research papers. He is also
a Senior Member of the CCF.
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