A Network Embeddings based Recommendation Model

with Multi-factor Consideration

Abstract. Recommendation systems are increasingly in demand to provide a per-

sonalized customer experience for diversified product mix offerings. Tradition-
ally we use interaction information based on user preferences and item charac-
teristics. This brings in collaborative filtering-driven recommendations with con-
siderable accuracy and relevance. However, such a method has certain limitations
in utilizing implicit information like cross-domain specific factors that are
equally important for making personalized recommendations. We propose an im-
provised way of using network embeddings based multi-factor matrix factoriza-
tion technique to make a match between both implicit and explicit features re-
sulting in more accurate recommendation.
The method consists of three main steps: First, network embedding formulation
performed on each user specific behavior network; then, embeddings weight dis-
tribution estimated through intermediate layers of network with final layer for
target (item purchased as labels); Finally, both factors: (a) Learned weights from
implicit data (cross-domain) and (b) explicit factors from domain data used by
multi-factorization method for recommendations.
The proposed method transfers knowledge across implicit and explicit factors
and associated dimensions. The suggested approach has been tested on real-world
data with evidence of outperforming existing algorithms with significant lift in
recommendation accuracy. Empirical experimentation outcomes illustrate the
potential of both factors for making effective recommendations.

Keywords: Recommendation model, multi-factor matrix factorization, embed-

dings, transfer learning, multi-behavior recommendations

1 Introduction

Recommendation system has been utilized and adopted by wide variety of applications
like product recommendation in travel, e-commerce, entertainment (OTT platforms),
content (online books, articles, archives of research content), personalization for push
notification and persona recommendation through graph networks (like social net-
work). Primarily, recommendation methods can be described by three broad categories
[2]: (1) Collaborative filtering (CF)[19], which obtains user preferences through users
and items interactions (2) Content-based recommendation, extracts preference based
on common characteristics of the items purchased or rated by users (3) Hybrid recom-
mendation refers to a combination of collaborative and content-based recommendation
methods. However, performance of conventional or traditional recommendation meth-
ods cannot be improved due to known common fact of data sparsity[23], [12].
In order to overcome data sparsity [22], cross-domain recommendation is most ef-
fective way to improvise recommendation outcome. Cross domain learning enables in-
formation flow from alternate data coming from diversified domains like music,
2

articles, books, movies etc. It leveraged most prominent way of learning i.e. transfer
learning to transfer common knowledge from dense alternate data source to original
sparse data (domain) [6],[14],[18]. Usage of transfer learning helped achieving im-
proved performance over traditional methods.
From a practical standpoint, availability of cross-domain data has it's own challenges
and to mitigate that we can take alternate route of using additional linked in-domain
data. For example, in the travel booking domain, there may exist additional information
which can help to get user-item interaction. User behavior can be defined by "time spent
on page", "click on item", "add to cart" etc., while the ‘item purchase’’ can be regarded
as target or action behavior. User behavior dimension is higher than action behavior
which helps to reduce sparsity, resulting in improving the recommendation perfor-
mance if the knowledge can be transferred from user behavior data to action behavior.
This paper proposes transfer learning-based recommendation method with multi-
factor matrix factorization. First, behavior data (user-item) represented by network
where nodes represented by user and action behavior (target). Second, network data
further aligned as multi-layer perceptron network which comprises of :
• Input layer: User activity initiation (first trigger)
• Intermediate layer(s): Represented by next activity in user journey before ac-
tion or target (like purchase/ selection)
• Output layer: contains target node where purchase or conclusive action has
been taken
As next step, we tried to achieve weight learning through this multi perceptron net-
work for known input and target which focusses on non-linear user-item interaction
(illustrated example in Figure 1). The most relevant work[24] also uses multiple behav-
iors to predict the user’s preference, with base assumption of similar rating pattern fol-
lowed by source and target behaviors. However, it lacks in exploring structural infor-
mation of rating matrix along with behavior uniqueness. Suggested network embed-
dings based multi-factor matrix factorization (NEMMF) method leverages deep learn-
ing-based network embedding for effective representation of user behavior which ex-
plains reflection of source behavior on action behavior.
Further, to deal with sparsity and improve accuracy, we used Matrix Factorization
(MF) [25], [5]. At core, MF decomposes input matrix into product of constituent matrix.
We considered input matrix as multi-dimensional feed created from A) Original user-
item interaction and, B) Network embeddings obtained from transfer learning-based
user interaction. After decomposing the input matrix, two matrices are then trained to
recalculate the user-item rating matrix. Most traditional CF algorithms ignore the rela-
tionship between users. In this work, we propose a multi-factor influenced embeddings
feed for recommendation method based on MF, where the effects of multi-factors in-
cluding the transfer learning-based user interaction and the user factor (original inter-
action from user-item matrix) have been considered.
The key contributions of this paper are as follows:
• Enabling transfer learning from cross-domain through user and action behav-
ior
• Multi-perceptron network embedding model used to learn the representation
of user / item nodes under behavior networks.
 3

• Multi-factor matrix factorization with ranking-based objective function to ef-

fectively evaluate the inconsistency between recommendation results ranking
and the ranking in the real data.
• Experimentations performed on real-world datasets to establish experimental
setup and demonstrate that suggested method achieves better performance
compared to state-of-the-art methods.
The paper is organized as follows: section 2 reviews related work in network embed-
ding, and collaborative filtering mechanism. Section 3 gives the problem formulation
and defines proposed model for embedding based multi-factor recommendation. The
framework is followed by the explanation of two components: networks embedding
module and multi-factor matrix factorization (prediction module based on multi-layer
perceptron). The experimental results are shown in Section 4. Our model is compared
with baseline methods and several related state-of-art methods comprising network em-
beddings and matrix factorization in Section 4.3. Section 5 concludes the paper.

2 Introduction

This section includes work comprising traditional recommendation methods, multi-be-

havior methods, matrix factorization and network embeddings based recommendations.

2.1 Multi behavior Matrix Factorization

Implicit factors like user click, pre buying cart action, save for later etc. have indirect
influence on user’s preference. Data abundance with implicit activities can help reduce
sparsity and make it available as real-time. Hence, it has been widely used in recom-
mendation systems [10], [26]. Traditional methods like multi-behavior recommenda-
tion broadly belong to two categories: combined matrix factorization (CMF) and
Bayesian methods (BM) based personalized ranking. The CMF method [21] extends
the matrix factorization (MF) method to factorize multidimensional user behavior ma-
trix. Multi-factor recommendation has attracted many researchers' attention; thus a va-
riety of recommendation methods have been proposed in the literature. For CF based
recommendation, consideration made for diversified factors, such as the user prefer-
ence, user-item interaction, etc. Levandoski et al. [27] suggested an extended CF filter-
ing approach with significant performance improvement of the proposed scheme. Their
scheme utilizes spatial properties of both users and items to derive final rating. Yuan et
al. [1] proposed temporal preference-based CF and applied smoothing on spatial di-
mension to derive recommendation with popularity enhancement, which combined
temporal and user interaction effects using user-based CF filtering. Noulas et al. [16]
applied the traditional MF method to propose open ended feedback data-based recom-
mendation. Cheng et al. [3] proposed a multi-dimension Gaussian model to compute
the factor impact. However, this model can’t overcome data sparsity. Liu et al. [10]
proposed a Bayesian non-negative Matrix Factorization (GTBNMF) method that com-
bines factors from geographical dimension and user interaction. Lian et al. [9]
4

suggested decomposed Weighted Matrix Factorization model. To deal with data spar-
sity, nonzero interactions were replaced with large weights and zero interactions im-
puted with smaller weights.
The Bayesian methods include the following work. The multi-channel Bayesian
model [7] adopts the strategy of utilizing different preference levels to diversified be-
haviors. Qiu et al. [20] propose a novel Bayesian approach for heterogeneous implicit
factors, which consumes the co-occurrence of multiple types of actions in for heteroge-
neous implicit data to make effective recommendation. In recent years, multi-dimen-
sional learning in heterogeneous networks has been extensively studied and adopted in
multi-behavior recommendation. Embedding representation helps achieve the complex
task of combining multi-behavior dimensions for recommendation. Gao et al. [17] pro-
posed novel method named NMTR (Neural Multi-Task Recommendation), which com-
bines network collaborative filtering with multitask learning to effectively learn from
multiple personas of user behaviors.
In this paper, implicit actions are formulated into multi-behavior network. We used
multi-perceptron network to model implicit behavior which is different from the above
methods. We solved data sparsity problem by learning one target behavior (or relation)
in a multi-behavior network with multiple source behavior.

2.2 Multi-behavior Network Embedding

A multi-behavior network is a multi-perceptron neural network, where users and items

are represented as nodes, and behaviors are represented as edges. Node embedding rep-
resents a low-dimensional latent of nodes in the network. Network embedding based
on deep learning helps to achieve significant lift in recommendation performance, such
as node2vec [4] and DeepWalk [8]. A multi-layer network embedding framework [13]
is proposed to model both implicit-layer and explicit-layer network dependencies. The
multi-network embedding method [11] proposed by H. Zhang et al. utilizes base net-
work to learn a common embedding and specific network to learn source network em-
bedding and then combine both with a transformation matrix. In this paper, we adopted
the idea of network embedding to generate the specific embedding in behavior network
and the common embedding in the base network.
In order to solve sparsity and performance accuracy problems, in this paper, we pro-
pose a network embeddings and matrix factorization recommendation model. Multi-
factor matrix factorization ensures decomposition of user interactions and embeddings
derived from cross domain training. Two influencing factors, including the multi-be-
havior factor (implicit or cross domain) and the user factor, have been introduced to
improve the accuracy of recommendation.

3 Proposed Method

We propose a novel network embedding based multi-factor matrix factorization

(NEMMF) recommendation method by considering both the implicit factor (multi-be-
havior) and user factor (traditional user-item interaction). The formal definition in-
cludes notations listed in Table 1.This section includes wo
 5

Table 1. Definition of Notation

Symbol Description
U User set { u1, u2,u3…..,un}
I Item set { i1, i2,i3…..,in}
X User – item matrix, where xu,i represents interaction between
user and item
Eu User embeddings
Ei Item embeddings
Nu,i Multi-behavior network
Yu,i Recommendation score of user ‘u’ for item ‘i’

3.1 General Framework

The proposed framework explains how we utilize network embedding to leverage trans-
fer learning from implicit multi-behavior feed and further applied factorization to ena-
ble recommendation. The general framework is shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Recommendation Framework

The whole process is divided into the following steps.

Firstly, the input data (illustrated in the leftmost layer in Figure 1) is processed sep-
arately; (A) purchase history data formulated as user-item matrix (traditional), (B)
Web-behavior comprising web history of user (implicit data) formulated as ‘User’ and
‘Item’ embeddings separately using node2vec [4]. This helps to learn low-dimensional
vector representation for both user and item nodes (C) item description or associated
descriptive meta data converted to TFIDF vectors which further supplemented the item
embeddings.
Secondly, hyperparameter tuning is used to learn the varied impact of each source
behavior on the target behavior in order to get a effective embedding representation of
user nodes and item nodes in the action/ target behavior network.
6

Finally, the updated user and item embeddings in the action behavior network are
sent into a nonlinear multi-layer neural architecture to generate final estimates from
embedding layers. This further coupled with user-item matrix and consumed by multi-
factor matrix factorization to generate recommendation. Implicit user behavior learning
achieved through network embeddings and traditional user-item interaction covered by
factor 1 (user-item matrix).

3.2 Network Embedding

This paper formulates implicit user and item interaction as multi-behavior network cre-
ated by user and item nodes. Here, the adoption of MNE (Multiplex Network Embed-
ding) [11] is introduced in implicit behavior network embedding. From multi-behavior
network Nu,i purposefully three behavior networks have been generated, A) base net-
work Nb, B) source networks Ns and C) target network Nt.
Whenever user interacts with item there will be existence of edge in network
Nb. Further, Nb is weighted network where weight of (u,i) determined by frequency of
interactions. Post network formulation we applied node2vec [4] algorithm to learn the
user embedding Eb for all the nodes in Nb and the item embeddings Ei for all nodes in
Ns and Nt. For sequential nodes, the loss function L is defined as:

𝐿 = − log 𝑆(𝑛j-w,...nj-1, nj+1,…… nj+w), (1)

where j is the position node n (n ∈ N) appears in the sequence, w is half of the win-
dow size defined in the Skip-gram model and nj-w , ….. nj-1, nj+1, … nj+w can be viewed
as the neighbors of node nj. s(nj|ni) is defined by a softmax function:
′𝑇 𝑢 )
exp(𝑢𝑛
𝑗 𝑛𝑖
𝑆(𝜂𝑗 |𝑛𝑖 ) = 𝑇 𝑢 ) , (2)
𝛴exp(𝑢𝑛 𝑛𝑖

Here, 𝑢𝑛′ and 𝑢𝑛 denotes output and input of a node respectively. The embedding
creation performed simultaneously across the network. The final outcome to the output
layer denotes M+1 pairs of the user and item embedding.
Last layer of implementation is a multi-layer perceptron module which learns
nonlinear preference model between the final embedding of user and item interaction.
Both user and item embeddings are concatenated and consumed by MLP [15]. MLP
comprised multiple hidden layers between the input and output layer. The paper uses
most common MLP model which is defined as:
𝑈𝑡′ = [𝑈𝑏 , 𝑈𝑠′ ], (3)
 7

Fig. 2. Pseudo Code of proposed algorithm

Here, 𝑈𝑡′ represents final combined embeddings of users created by combining specific
embedding of users in target network 𝑈𝑏 and weighted specific embeddings of users 𝑈𝑠′
𝑉𝑡′ = [𝑉𝑏 , 𝑉𝑠′ ], (4)

Here, 𝑉𝑡′ represents final combined embeddings of users created by combining specific
embedding of items in target network 𝑉𝑏 and weighted specific embeddings of items 𝑉𝑠′

𝑧1 = [𝑈𝑡′ , 𝑉𝑡′ ], (5)

Here, 𝑧1 is concatenated embeddings from user and item embeddings defined as equa-
tion (3) and (4) respectively.

𝑧2 = 𝑓(𝑤 𝑇 𝑧1 + 𝑏) (6)
8

Here, f is activation function, experimented and selected ReLU as sigmoid and Tanh
both suffer from vanishing gradient problem.

𝑌𝑢𝑖^ = 𝜎(𝑍2 ), (7)

The output of multi layer perceptron is 𝑌𝑢𝑖^ and value is bounded between 0 and 1,
stands for likelihood that the user u is interested in the item i. The pseudocode of the
proposed model is presented in Figure 2.

3.3 Multi-factor Matrix Factorization

The basic matrix factorization recommendation uses user-item interaction and unable
to extract effective perception. Hence, we introduced multi-factor matrix factorization
which considers implicit matrix created through network embeddings and traditional
user-item matrix. The influence of both factors can be defined as follows:

The latent factor matrix comprising latent factors derived from implicit user -item in-
teraction is defined as: 𝜃 = {𝐿(1) , 𝐿(2) , 𝑈 (1) , 𝑈 (2) }

Latent factors learned by learning algorithm and further regularized to avoid over-fit-
ting and limit the size of latent vector as follows:

(1)
‖𝑙𝑙 ‖2 ≤ 𝐶 𝑙 = 1,2,3 … . |𝐿| (9)
(2)
‖𝑙𝑙 ‖2 ≤ 𝛽𝐶 𝑙 = 1,2,3 … . |𝐿| (10)
(1)
‖𝑈𝑢 ‖2 ≤ 𝐶 𝑢 = 1,2,3 … . |𝑈| (11)
(2)
‖𝑈𝑢 ‖2 ≤ 𝛼𝐶 𝑢 = 1,2,3 … . |𝑈| (12)

Where hyperparameters defined in range as: C >0, 0≤α≤1 and 0≤𝛽≤1. The parameter α
regulates over-fitting and limits the weight of implicit features (interactions) impact.
Similarly, β introduced to balance the influence of the user factor in order to prevent
the over-fitting.

4 Performance Evaluation

In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed network embeddings model based
on multi-factor matrix factorization, we compare it with three algorithms in the
literature:
• TIE-4-RS [24]: This method enhances performance by enabling information
transfer from source behaviors to the target behavior. This method clusters
 9

the user and items based and provides predicted rating as recommendation
outcome.
• NMTR [17]: This method utilizes neural network architecture to learn user
preference from multi-behavior data.
• NeuMF [15]: The method is based on neural networks to enhance the perfor-
mance of collaborative filtering on implicit interaction. Neural architecture
applied to learn the interaction between the latent factors.

4.1 Test Dataset

To evaluate the proposed method, we consumed publicly available multi-behavior da-

taset i.e. Tmall1. Tmall is E-commerce platform and user action (1 million users) like
click, add to cart, achieve, save for later and purchase. The number of purchase contrib-
utes 4%, while non-purchase behaviors accounts for 96%. The dataset contains 987,994
users and 4,162,024 items with high sparsity (>99%).

4.2 Evaluation Metrics

We used precision and recall evaluating performance of different recommendation al-

gorithms. The precision for user u is defined as follows:
𝑡𝑝𝑢
Pre𝑢 @𝑁 = (13)
𝑡𝑝𝑢 +𝑓𝑝𝑢

where @N indicates the number of recommendations, 𝑡𝑝𝑢 represents the correct recom-
mendations made in the top N when compared with the actual data, 𝑓𝑝𝑢 is equal to the
number of correct recommendations made in the top N recommendations which are not
in the actual data. The recall of recommendation for user u is defined as follows:

𝑡𝑝𝑢
Rec𝑢 @𝑁 = (14)
𝑡𝑝𝑢 +𝑡𝑛𝑢

where 𝑡𝑝𝑢 represents correct recommendations made in the top N when compared with
the actual data, 𝑡𝑛𝑢 is equal to the number of recommendations which are not in predic-
tion but are visited in actual data.

4.3 Experimental Results

In the experiments, after performing hyper-parameter tuning we set the hyper-parame-
ters ε=0.5 and C=0.85, the latent factor dimensions k=150. In addition, to ensure accu-
racy, we kept learning rate as small as 0.0005. We set β=0.2 through a number of initial
trial on the validation data set. We compare the precision and recall of the proposed
network embedding based multi-factor matrix factorization (NEMMF) method with
three state-of-the-art algorithms; TIE-4-RS, NMTR and NeuMF on the Tmall data set.
Experimental results of Pre@N and Rec@N for N={5,10,20} have been shown in Fig.
3.
 Fig. 3. Performance comparison on Tmall data

For the Tmall dataset, experimental results show that the proposed network embedding
based multi-factor matrix factorization algorithm outperforms other methods men-
tioned in comparison. Our proposed method performs best by considering both implicit
factor and the user factor. In addition, the hyperparameter tuning with optimal param-
eter values exhibited improvement in recommendation accuracy.

5 Conclusion

In this work, a new recommendation model based on network embeddings based multi-
factor matrix factorization (NEMMF) has been proposed by considering both the
implicit factor and the user factor. First, a specific network embedding model is used
to learn the representation of users and items under multi-behavior network. Then, the
tuning mechanism is used to obtain optimal weight of different behaviors to get the
aggregated node embedding. Finally, all the embeddings combined to multi-layer
perceptron for training. Embeddings furter clubbed with user-item interaction matrix
derived from purchase behavior to predict user’s preference for an item. Comparative
experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and
the reason for parameter settings is explained. More impact factors can be considered
in the future. For example, in general, individuals have similar preferences for similar
objects, so a similar set of users can be combined and this new cluster or cohort can be
added to the recommendation model as another impact factor. Additionally, other
embedding methods will be explored in future, such as the methods based on tensor
decomposition.

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