Improving Long-Tail Item Recommendation with Graph Augmentation

The ubiquitous long-tail distribution of inherent user behaviors results in worse recommendation performance for the items with fewer user records (i.e., tail items) than those with richer ones (i.e., head items). Graph-based recommendation methods (e.g., using graph neural networks) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for recommender systems, often outperforming traditional methods. However, existing techniques for alleviating the long-tail problem mainly focus on traditional methods. There is a lack of graph-based methods that can efficiently deal with the long-tail problem.