Solving Cold Start Problem in Recommendation with Attribute Graph Neural Networks

Matrix completion is a classic problem underlying recommender systems. It is traditionally tackled with matrix factorization. Recently, deep learning based methods, especially graph neural networks, have made impressive progress on this problem. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods focus on modeling the user-item interaction graph. The inherent drawback of such methods is that their performance is bound to the density of the interactions, which is however usually of high sparsity. More importantly, for a cold start user/item that does not have any interactions, such methods are unable to learn the preference embedding of the user/item since there is no link to this user/item in the graph. In this work, we develop a novel framework Attribute Graph Neural Networks (AGNN) by exploiting the attribute graph rather than the commonly used interaction graph. This leads to the capability of learning embeddings for cold start users/items. Our AGNN can produce the preference embedding for a cold user/item by learning on the distribution of attributes with an extended variational auto-encoder structure. Moreover, we propose a new graph neural network variant, i.e., gated-GNN, to effectively aggregate various attributes of different modalities in a neighborhood. Empirical results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model yields significant improvements for cold start recommendations and outperforms or matches state-of-the-arts performance in the warm start scenario.