Graph Neural Networks
Assembly Line
Using graph neural networks to recommend related products
In experiments, we found that our approach outperformed state-of-the-art baselines by 30% to 160%, as measured by HitRate and mean reciprocal rank, both of which compare model predictions to actual customer co-purchases. We have begun to deploy this model in production.
The main difficulty with using graph neural networks (GNNs) to do related-product recommendation is that the relationships between products are asymmetric. It makes perfect sense to recommend a phone case to someone who’s buying a new phone but less sense to recommend a phone to someone who’s buying a case. We solve this problem by producing two embeddings of every graph node: one that characterizes its role as the source of a related-product recommendation and one that characterizes its role as the target. We also present a new loss function that encourages related-product recommendation (RPR) models to select products along outbound graph edges and discourages them from recommending products along inbound edges.