Performance of Covariance Neural Networks on Rating Prediction
Timothy Axel (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
E. Isufi – Mentor (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
K Hildebrandt – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Computer Graphics and Visualisation)
Andrea Cavallo – Mentor (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
C. Liu – Mentor (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
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Abstract
Recommender systems help users navigate vast catalogs of content through recommendations, of which rating prediction remains an important task. Traditional methods such as collaborative filtering often struggle to model higher-order relationships between users and items, as well as suffer from the cold start problem when the number of users and items is still low. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in this area, although they are often limited by their focus on local graph structures. This study explores the application of Covariance Neural Networks (VNNs) for rating prediction, leveraging covariance matrices to leverage global statistical dependencies and model higher-order relationships. Using the MovieLens-100k dataset, we evaluate the performance of VNNs against baselines and other models, using RMSE as the metric of evaluation. Our results demonstrate that VNNs outperform simple matrix completion techniques, but are limited by their susceptibility to oversmoothing. This work highlights the potential of VNNs for recommender systems while underscoring the need for careful architectural design to balance performance and stability.