Heterogeneous Meta-Path Graph Learning for Higher-Order Social Recommendation

Recommendation systems have become an indispensable part of daily life. Social recommendation systems, which utilize social relationships and past behaviors to infer users’ preferences, have gained popularity in recent years. Exploring the inherent characteristics implied by higher-order relationships offers a new approach to social recommendation. However, it is challenging due to sparse social networks, influence heterogeneity, and noisy feedback. In this article, we propose a Heterogeneous Meta-path Graph Learning model for Higher-order Social Recommendation (HEAL). Within HEAL, we introduce a heterogeneous graph in social recommendation and utilize a meta-path-guided random walk to generate higher-order relationships. By encoding higher-order structures and semantics along different meta-graphs, HEAL can mitigate the limitation of data sparsity. Moreover, HEAL exploits aspect-aware and semantic-aware attentions to adaptively propagate and aggregate useful features from different meta-neighbors and higher-order relations. These attention-based aggregation layers allow HEAL to suppress the heterogeneity of social influences. Furthermore, HEAL adopts contrastive learning as a supplemental task to the recommendation task by maximizing the consistency between the self-discriminating objectives. This auxiliary task enables the model to learn more differentiated representations, further reducing its sensitivity to noisy feedback. We evaluate the performance of HEAL through extensive experiments on public datasets. The results demonstrate that leveraging higher-order relations can enhance the quality of social recommendations by better capturing the complexity and diversity of users’ preferences and interactions.