Meta-path fusion based neural recommendation in heterogeneous information networks.

As a powerful data modeling tool, Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN) has been successfully used in auxiliary information exploitation to boost recommendation performance. For HIN based recommendation, it is challenging to extract and fuse useful features of user preferences and item attributes under different semantic paths in HINs. Existing methods leverage a pre-defined fusion function to integrate different semantics for recommendation, which cannot characterize the complex nonlinear interactions between users and items. In this paper, we present a general framework named MNRec, short for Meta-path fusion based Neural Recommendation, to extract and fuse user and item embeddings under different meta-paths for recommendation. Under the framework, we propose an instantiation of MNRec with Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) structure. It consists of two major steps, i.e., meta-path based heterogeneous network embedding and deep learning based rating prediction. Concretely, appropriate meta-paths are first designed according to domain knowledge. Then the embeddings of users and items are obtained through a meta-path and commuting matrix based heterogeneous network embedding method. Finally, in light of the powerful nonlinear modeling capabilities of deep neural networks, the learned embeddings under different meta-paths are integrated into a two-pathway MLP structure for rating prediction. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of MNRec compared with state-of-the-art baselines in rating prediction.