Self-Supervised Learning Recommendation with Enhanced Long-Tail Nodes

Achieving a balance between recommending popular items and long-tail items has consistently posed a challenge in the field of recommendation systems. Traditional recommendation algorithms often exhibit a bias towards recommending popular items, resulting in limited exposure for long-tail items. To address this issue, our study introduces an innovative recommendation algorithm based on graph contrastive learning. This algorithm incorporates a dual-view learning mechanism with the objective of increasing the exposure of long-tail items while ensuring the accuracy of recommendations. Two distinct views are generated: one captures in-depth information of long-tail nodes through random walk strategies, while the other utilizes Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to acquire node importance and contextual information. By means of contrastive learning with these two views, our model attains comprehensive node representations. The study strives to achieve a balanced learning process between long-tail and high-frequency nodes. Experimental results conducted on multiple recommendation system datasets substantiate that our approach significantly enhances the exposure of long-tail items compared to existing recommendation algorithms, while maintaining high accuracy and recall in recommendations. This research attests that the contrastive learning framework provides an effective strategy for addressing the long-tail recommendation problem.