Collaborative Meta-Path Modeling for Explainable Recommendation

Although recommender systems have achieved considerable success, sometimes it is difficult to convince users due to the failure to explain the recommendation results. For this reason, explainable recommender systems have drawn a lot of attention in recent years. Among explainable recommendation models, the meta-path-based model plays a significant role because it can reason over the path connecting a user–item pair to achieve explainability. However, it is difficult for the meta-path-based model to achieve such a common explanation in collaborative filtering as "a user similar to you has purchased item $A$ " because there is no such meta-path. In this article, we contribute a new model named collaborative meta-path modeling for explainable recommendation (COMPER). It models the similarity of user pairs and item pairs through rating information and constructs collaborative meta-paths for explainability. In addition, we design an attention mechanism to aggregate different paths connecting the target user and the target item. Moreover, the information of the subgraph composed of all paths connecting the target user and the target item is integrated for rating prediction. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that COMPER achieves good performance in a variety of scenarios, achieving improvements over several baselines.