  Learning vector representations (aka. embeddings) of users and items lies at
the core of modern recommender systems. Ranging from early matrix factorization
to recently emerged deep learning based methods, existing efforts typically
obtain a user's (or an item's) embedding by mapping from pre-existing features
that describe the user (or the item), such as ID and attributes. We argue that
an inherent drawback of such methods is that, the collaborative signal, which
is latent in user-item interactions, is not encoded in the embedding process.
As such, the resultant embeddings may not be sufficient to capture the
collaborative filtering effect.
  In this work, we propose to integrate the user-item interactions -- more
specifically the bipartite graph structure -- into the embedding process. We
develop a new recommendation framework Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering
(NGCF), which exploits the user-item graph structure by propagating embeddings
on it. This leads to the expressive modeling of high-order connectivity in
user-item graph, effectively injecting the collaborative signal into the
embedding process in an explicit manner. We conduct extensive experiments on
three public benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements over several
state-of-the-art models like HOP-Rec and Collaborative Memory Network. Further
analysis verifies the importance of embedding propagation for learning better
user and item representations, justifying the rationality and effectiveness of
NGCF. Codes are available at
https://github.com/xiangwang1223/neural_graph_collaborative_filtering.
