Dual Autoencoder Network with Swap Reconstruction for Cold-Start Recommendation

Cold-start is a long-standing and challenging problem in recommendation systems. To tackle this issue, many cross-domain recommendation approaches are proposed. However, most of them follow a two-stage embedding-and-mapping paradigm, which is hard to be optimized. Besides, they ignore the structure information of the user-item interaction graph, resulting in that the embedding is insufficient to capture the latent collaborative filtering effect. In this paper, we propose a Dual Autoencoder Network (DAN), which implements cross-domain recommendations to cold-start users in an end-to-end manner. The graph convolutional network (GCN) based encoder in DAN explicitly captures high-order collaborative information in user-item interaction graphs. The two-branched decoder is proposed for fully exploiting the data across domains, and therefore the elaborate reconstruction constraints are obtained under a domain swapping strategy. Experiments on two pairs of real-world cross-domain datasets demonstrate that DAN outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.