Co-purchaser Recommendation Based on Network Embedding

Although recommending co-purchasers for a target buyer on the group buying is an interesting problem, existing studies haven’t paid attention to this topic. Different from the collaborator recommendation that only considers users with high similarity to the target user, co-purchaser recommendation takes both users with high and weak similarity into account, and the recommendation results can achieve high recall and diversity. However, the task turns out to be a challenging problem since it is hard to make a precise recommendation for buyers with weak similarity. To address the problem, we propose the following two methods. In the first one, we directly impose a penalty to the weakly similar co-purchasers in the embedding space. To further improve the recommendation performance, in the second one, we smoothly increase the co-occurrence probability of the weakly similar co-purchasers by truncated bias walk. Our experimental results on real datasets show that the proposed methods, particularly the latter, can effectively complete the co-purchaser recommendation and has a high recommendation performance.