Community preserving social recommendation with Cyclic Transfer Learning

Transfer learning-based recommendation mitigates the sparsity of user-item interactions by introducing auxiliary domains. Social influence extracted from direct connections between users typically serves as an auxiliary domain to improve prediction performance. However, direct social connections also face severe data sparsity problems that limit model performance. In contrast, users’ dependency on communities is another valuable social information that has not yet received sufficient attention. Although studies have incorporated community information into recommendation by aggregating users’ preferences within the same community, they seldom capture the structural discrepancies among communities and the influence of structural discrepancies on users’ preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a community-preserving recommendation framework with cyclic transfer learning, incorporating heterogeneous community influence into the rating domain. We analyze the characteristics of the community domain and its inter-influence on the rating domain, and construct link constraints and preference constraints in the community domain. The shared vectors that bridge the rating domain and the community domain are allowed to be more consistent with the characteristics of both domains. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets. The results manifest the excellent performance of our approach in capturing real users’ preferences compared with other state-of-the-art methods.