Inductive Matrix Completion Based on Graph Neural Networks

We propose an inductive matrix completion model without using side information. By factorizing the (rating) matrix into the product of low-dimensional latent embeddings of rows (users) and columns (items), a majority of existing matrix completion methods are \textit{transductive}, since the learned embeddings cannot generalize to unseen rows/columns or to new matrices. To make matrix completion \textit{inductive}, content (side information), such as user's age or movie's genre, has to be used previously. However, high-quality content is not always available, and can be hard to extract. Under the extreme setting where not any side information is available other than the matrix to complete, can we still learn an inductive matrix completion model? In this paper, we investigate this seemingly impossible problem and propose an Inductive Graph-based Matrix Completion (IGMC) model without using any side information. It trains a graph neural network (GNN) based purely on local subgraphs around (user, item) pairs generated from the rating matrix and maps these subgraphs to their corresponding ratings. Our model achieves highly competitive performance with state-of-the-art transductive baselines. In addition, since our model is inductive, it can generalize to users/items unseen during the training (given that their ratings exist), and can even transfer to new tasks. Our transfer learning experiments show that a model trained out of the MovieLens dataset can be directly used to predict Douban movie ratings and works surprisingly well.