BayDNN: Friend Recommendation with Bayesian Personalized Ranking Deep Neural Network.

Friendship is the cornerstone to build a social network. In online social networks, statistics show that the leading reason for user to create a new friendship is due to recommendation. Thus the accuracy of recommendation matters. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian Personalized Ranking Deep Neural Network (BayDNN) model for friend recommendation in social networks. With BayDNN, we achieve significant improvement on two public datasets: Epinions and Slashdot. For example, on Epinions dataset, BayDNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms, with a 5% improvement on NDCG over the best baseline. The advantages of the proposed BayDNN mainly come from its underlying convolutional neural network (CNN), which offers a mechanism to extract latent deep structural feature representations of the complicated network data, and a novel Bayesian personalized ranking idea, which precisely captures the users' personal bias based on the extracted deep features. To get good parameter estimation for the neural network, we present a fine-tuned pre-training strategy for the proposed BayDNN model based on Poisson and Bernoulli probabilistic models.