Social recommendation system is to predict unobserved user-item rating values by taking advantage of user-user social relation and user-item ratings. However, user/item diversities in social recommendations are not well utilized in the literature. Especially, inter-factor (social and rating factors) relations and distinct rating values need taking into more consideration. In this paper, we propose an attentive social recommendation system (ASR) to address this issue from two aspects. First, in ASR, Rec-conv graph network layers are proposed to extract the social factor, user-rating and item-rated factors and then automatically assign contribution weights to aggregate these factors into the user/item embedding vectors. Second, a disentangling strategy is applied for diverse rating values. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our ASR.

The creation of novel recommendation algorithms for social networks is currently struggling with the volume of available data originating in such environments. Given that social networks can be modeled as graphs, a distributed graph-oriented support to exploit the computing capabilities of clusters arises as a necessity. In this thesis, a platform for graph storage and processing named Graphly is proposed along with GraphRec, an API for easy specification of recommendation algorithms. Graphly and GraphRec hide distributed programming concerns from the user while still allowing fine-tuning of the remote execution. For example, users may customize an algorithm execution using job distribution strategies, without modifying the original code. GraphRec also simplifies the design of graph-based recommender systems by implementing well-known algorithms as “primitives” that can be reused.