A Social Recommendation Based on Metric Learning and Users' Co-Occurrence Pattern

For personalized recommender systems, matrix factorization and its variants have become mainstream in collaborative filtering. However, the dot product in matrix factorization does not satisfy the triangle inequality and therefore fails to capture fine-grained information. Metric learning-based models have been shown to be better at capturing fine-grained information than matrix factorization. Nevertheless, most of these models only focus on rating data and social information, which are not sufficient for dealing with the challenges of data sparsity. In this paper, we propose a metric learning-based social recommendation model called SRMC. SRMC exploits users' co-occurrence patterns to discover their potentially similar or dissimilar users with symmetric relationships and change their relative positions to achieve better recommendations. Experiments on three public datasets show that our model is more effective than the compared models.