Hybrid Deep Neural Networks for Friend Recommendations in Edge Computing Environment

With the rising popularity of social networks and service recommendations, research on new methods of friend recommendation have become a key topic, especially when based on quality-driven resource processing in an edge computing environment. Traditional methods seldom systematically combine static attributes (e.g., interests, geographical locations, and common friends), dynamic behaviors (e.g., liking, making comments, forwarding and @), and network structures (e.g., social ties) to recommend a new friend to a target user. Meanwhile, with the advent of deep learning, it has become more challenging to integrate these features into a deep neural network framework for friend recommendation. For example, how do we optimally make use of these features to form a united framework and what type of deep neural network architecture should be introduced into a novel recommendation method in an edge computing environment? In this paper, we propose DFRec++, a hybrid deep neural network framework combining attribute attention and network embeddings to make social friend recommendations with the help of both interactive semantics and contextual enhancement. More specifically, we first utilize the latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model to generate common interest topics between users and compute the similarity of the explicit static attribute vector representation of topics, locations, and common friends. Then we feed dynamic behavior attributes into a convolutional neural network (CNN) to obtain the implicit vector representation of the interactions and context between two users. Subsequently, a multi-attention mechanism is designed to further improve the deep vector representation of the attribute information. Next, the LINE-based network embeddings algorithm is applied to embed the network structure into a low-dimensional vector. Finally, the attribute attention vector and the network embeddings are concatenated to form a deep feature representation, which is subsequently fed to a fully connected neural network (FCNN) to capture the probability of friendship between two users. The output of FCNN indicates the probability of two users becoming friends. We conducted experiments on a real-world Weibo dataset and the results show that DFRec++ outperforms several existing methods.