A memory pool variational autoencoder framework for cross-domain recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) leverages knowledge from the source domain to make recommendations for the cold-start users in the target domain. On account of fully utilizing information, various relationships among users and items are taken into account, i.e., the interaction relationship between users and their corresponding items; the relationship among users or items; and the indirect relationship between the user and items related to other users. In order to process these relationships, we propose a novel framework named Memory Pool Variational AutoEncoder (MPVAE). The main advantages of the MPVAE model lie in three aspects: (1) it generates the embedding representations that incorporate more information by a memory pool mechanism in the source and target domains; (2) it involves the relationship among users or items efficiently by the similarity measurement, further, the indirect relationship can be explicitly described, which makes full use of information in the source domain; and (3) it leverages the superiority of the probability model from the perspective of the VAE structure, which ensures generation and robustness. Comprehensive experiments on three real datasets show that the proposed model achieves remarkable superiority over several competitive CDR models.