Hypergraph Convolutional Network for Group Recommendation

Group activities have become an essential part of people’s daily life, which stimulates the requirement for intensive research on the group recommendation task, i.e., recommending items to a group of users. Most existing works focus on aggregating users’ interests within the group to learn group preference. These methods are faced with two problems. First, these methods only model the user preference inside a single group while ignoring the collaborative relations among users and items across different groups. Second, they assume that group preference is an aggregation of user interests, and factually a group may pursue some targets not derived from users’ interests. Thus they are insufficient to model the general group preferences which are independent of existing user interests. To address the above issues, we propose a novel dual channel Hypergraph Convolutional network for group Recommendation (HCR), which consists of member-level preference network and group-level preference network. In the member-level preference network, in order to capture cross-group collaborative connections among users and items, we devise a member-level hypergraph convolutional network to learn group members’ personal preferences. In the group-level preference network, the group’s general preference is captured by a group-level graph convolutional network based on group similarity. We evaluate our model on two real-world datasets and the experimental results show that the proposed model significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art group recommendation techniques.