Recommendation in Heterogeneous Information Networks Based on Generalized Random Walk Model and Bayesian Personalized Ranking

Recommendation based on heterogeneous information network(HIN) is attracting more and more attention due to its ability to emulate collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, context-aware recommendation and combinations of any of these recommendation semantics. Random walk based methods are usually used to mine the paths, weigh the paths, and compute the closeness or relevance between two nodes in a HIN. A key for the success of these methods is how to properly set the weights of links in a HIN. In existing methods, the weights of links are mostly set heuristically. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian Personalized Ranking(BPR) based machine learning method, called HeteLearn, to learn the weights of links in a HIN. In order to model user preferences for personalized recommendation, we also propose a generalized random walk with restart model on HINs. We evaluate the proposed method in a personalized recommendation task and a tag recommendation task. Experimental results show that our method performs significantly better than both the traditional collaborative filtering and the state-of-the-art HIN-based recommendation methods.