RPITN: Review Based Preference Invariance Transfer Network for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Abstract

Cross-domain recommendation is an effective way to cope with the cold-start problem in recommendation systems. Knowledge of the current, particularly reviews, is taken into account to improve user/item embedding to reduce the neg-ative transfer that occurs during mapping processes across the source and target domains. Traditional approaches, on the other hand, typically apply review information from the source and target domain independently without consideration of user preference divergence. In this paper, we propose a novel Review-based Preference Invariance Transfer Network (RPITN) to minimize negative transfer by combining reviews from two domains. We first build a review preference invari-ance (RPI) embedding procedure to express user/item review correlations between two domains. Then, to improve the gen-eralization ability of user/item embedding and prevent negative transfer across domains, we carefully insert RPI into the embedding learning and mapping process. Extensive exper-iments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of RPITN compared with other recommendation methods.