Cross-domain recommender system with embedding- and mapping-based knowledge correlation

A knowledge transfer-based cross-domain recommender system is currently a research hotspot. Existing research has reached a high level of maturity in mining potential knowledge and establishing transfer mechanisms. However, most of them ignore the impact of the dissimilarity of potential knowledge on the transfer performance. Herein, a cross-domain recommender system based on knowledge correlation-induced the embedding and mapping approach is proposed, denoted by KCEM-CDRS. First, we propose a knowledge correlation measure, which captures the consistency of knowledge between the target and source domains to build the bridge for knowledge transfer. Second, we construct a joint matrix triple factorization model to solve the data sparsity in the target domain while introducing graph regularization to solve the problem of negative knowledge transfer. Results of extensive experiments on real Amazon metadata indicate that compared with three existing cross-domain recommendation methods, KCEM-CDRS shows performance improvements of 0.05–9.55 % and 0.02–2.63 % on mean absolute error and root mean square error, respectively. Additionally, the results of the ablation experiments indicate that consideration of the knowledge correlation between domains is beneficial for knowledge transfer when the density of the source domain is rich.