Item-Based Collaborative Memory Networks for Recommendation

Item-based Collaborative Filtering (ICF or Item-based CF) has been widely applied for recommender systems in industrial scenarios, owing to its efficiency in user preference modeling and flexibility in online personalization. It captures a user's preference from his or her historically interacted items, recommending new items that are the most similar to the user's preference. Recently, several works propose advanced neural network architectures to learn item similarities from rating data, by modeling items as latent vectors and learning model parameters by optimizing a recommendation-aware objective function. While much literature attempts to use classical neural networks such as multi-layer perception (MLP), to learn item similarities, there has been relatively less work employing memory networks for ICF, which can more accurately record the detailed information about entities than classical neural networks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a powerful Item-based Collaborative Memory Network (ICMN) for ICF, which bases on the architecture of Memory Networks. Besides, a neural attention mechanism is adopted to focus on the most important historically interacted items. The core of our ICMN is the cooperation of external and internal memory and the contribution of the neural attention mechanism. Compare to the state-of-the-art ICF methods, our ICMN possesses the merit of powerful representation capability. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ICMN. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that applies memory networks for ICF.