Inhomogeneous Social Recommendation with

Hypergraph Convolutional Networks

Presented By
M. Aamir Gulzar(21I-2249), Javeria Zia(21I-2188)
Presented To
Dr. Kifayat Alizai

Paper Category: Recommendation

Conference, Year: ICDE, 2021
Outline
• Background
• Introduction
• Problem Statement
• Methodology
• Evaluation Criteria and datasets
• Our Proposed Methodology
• References

2
Background
• With the growing availability of online social networks, social
recommendation has become an important research area in
personalized recommendation.
• However, existing social recommendation models often suffer from
limitations due to the homogeneity of social relations, i.e., if all social
connections have equal importance.
• In reality, social relations can be highly diverse and inhomogeneous.
• This inhomogeneity can lead to poor recommendation performance
and limited ability to capture complex relationships.

3
Introduction
 The paper proposes a hypergraph-based model that can capture the
inhomogeneous structure of social relations.
• Hypergraph convolutional network that combines both user-item
interactions and social relations for personalized recommendation.
• Effective modeling of the complex and inhomogeneous structure of
social relations.
• It shows superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods
on several real-world datasets.

4
Problem Statement
• Existing social recommendation models often suffer from the
homogeneity assumption, i.e., treating all social relations equally. This
can lead to suboptimal recommendations, as some social connections
may be more influential or relevant than others. Therefore, there is a
need for novel approaches that can capture the inhomogeneous
structure between the users and items.

Figure 1. Inhomogeneous Relationship b/w user and items

5
Methodology
• The paper proposes a novel approach using hypergraphs and
hypergraph convolutional networks (HGCNs) to learn embeddings for
users and items based on multiple types of interactions, to improve
recommendation performance on inhomogeneous networks with
complex relationships between users and items.

Figure 2. Methodology (HGCNs)

6
Methodology (cont.)
• Hypergraph Construction: Construct a hypergraph that models the
inhomogeneous social relationships between users and items, including
the triplet social relation that involves multiple users and items.
• Embedding Layer: Assign each node in the hypergraph a trainable low-
dimensional embedding vector in the latent space.
• Hypergraph Convolutional Layer: Use hypergraph convolutional layers
to propagate embeddings on the hypergraph, allowing the embeddings
of both vertexes and hyperedges to capture inhomogeneous social
influence.
• Prediction and Optimization: Use inner product to obtain
recommendation results and optimize the model parameters using the
Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss.
7
Evaluation Criteria and Dataset
Evaluation Criteria
• Recall@k: Measures the proportion
of items that were correctly
recommended in the top k items for
each user.
• NDCG@k: measures the ranked
order quality of the recommended
items, considering the relevance
and position of each item in the
recommendation list.
Dataset
• Yelp2018: A restaurant
recommendation dataset with 131K
users, 193K items, and 1.22M
reviews.
• Amazon-Book: A book
recommendation dataset with 2.5M
users, 900K items, and 32M reviews.
• Douban-Movie: A movie
recommendation dataset with 300K
users, 85K items, and 2.75M reviews.
8
Proposed Methodology
• We can extend the current hypergraph-based model to incorporate
attention mechanisms that can learn to weight different social
connections based on their relevance and importance to the
recommendation task.
• Use a graph attention network (GAT) to encode the social relations
and capture the inhomogeneous structure of the social network.

9
Proposed Methodology (cont.)
• We can evaluate the proposed approach on large real-world datasets
by generating multiple pairs of user-item interactions instead of just
one.
• Hadoop ecosystem can be utilized for this purpose. Graph-based
algorithms like graph clustering or community detection can be used
to identify similar user and item pairs based on their interaction
patterns.

10
Results comparison
• Results on baseline model
Results comparison
• Results on our proposed methodology
References
[1] Zhu, Zirui, et al. "Inhomogeneous Social Recommendation with
Hypergraph Convolutional Networks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.03344
(2021).
[2] Sharma, Kartik, et al. "A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for
Social Recommender Systems." arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.04481 (2022).

13
THANK YOU! 14