Hybrid Matrix Factorization Based Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation System

Abstract: In recent years, methods that combine contrastive learning with graph neural networks have emerged to address the challenges of recommendation systems, demonstrating powerful performance and playing a significant role in this domain. Contrastive learning primarily tackles the issue of data sparsity by employing data augmentation strategies, effectively alleviating this problem and showing promising results. Although existing research has achieved favorable outcomes, most current graph contrastive learning methods are based on two types of data augmentation strategies: the first involves perturbing the graph structure, such as by randomly adding or removing edges; and the second applies clustering techniques. We believe that the interactive information obtained through these two strategies does not fully capture the user-item interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel method called HMFGCL (Hybrid Matrix Factorization Based Graph Contrastive Learning), which integrates two distinct matrix factorization techniques-low-rank matrix factorization (MF) and singular value decomposition (SVD)-to complementarily acquire global collaborative information, thereby constructing enhanced views. Experimental results on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing baselines, particularly on small-scale datasets.