Inductive Collaborative Filtering via Relation Graph Learning

Collaborative filtering has shown great power in predicting potential user-item ratings by factorizing an observed user-item rating matrix into products of two sets of latent factors. However, the user-specific latent factors can only be learned in transductive setting and a model trained on existing users cannot adapt to new users without training a new model. In this paper, we propose an inductive collaborative filtering framework that learns a hidden relational graph among users from the rating matrix. We first consider a base matrix factorization model trained on one group of users' ratings and devise a relation inference model that estimates their underlying relations (as dense weighted graphs) to other users with respect to historical rating patterns. The relational graphs enable attentive message passing from users to users in the latent space and are updated in end-to-end manner. The key advantage of our model is the capability for inductively computing user-specific representations using no feature, with good scalability and superior expressiveness compared to other feature-driven inductive models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for inductive learning on several matrix completion benchmarks, provides very close performance to transductive models when given many training ratings and exceeds them significantly on cold-start users.