Spectral Collaborative Filtering

Despite the popularity of Collaborative Filtering (CF), CF-based methods are haunted by the cold-start problem, which has a significantly negative impact on users' experiences with Recommender Systems (RS). In this paper, to overcome the aforementioned drawback, we first formulate the relationships between users and items as a bipartite graph. Then, we propose a new spectral convolution operation directly performing in the spectral domain, where not only the proximity information of a graph but also the connectivity information hidden in the graph are revealed. With the proposed spectral convolution operation, we build a deep recommendation model called Spectral Collaborative Filtering (SpectralCF). Benefiting from the rich information of connectivity existing in the spectral domain, SpectralCF is capable of discovering deep connections between users and items and therefore, alleviates the cold-start problem for CF. To the best of our knowledge, SpectralCF is the first CF-based method directly learning from the spectral domains of user-item bipartite graphs. We apply our method on several standard datasets. It is shown that SpectralCF significantly out-performs state-of-the-art models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/lzheng21/SpectralCF.