SMAR: self-supervised mobile application recommendation based on graph convolutional networks

Purpose With the exponential growth of mobile applications, recommending suitable mobile applications to users becomes a critical challenge. Although existing methods have made achievements in mobile application recommendation by leveraging graph convolutional networks (GCNs), they suffer from two limitations: the reliance on a singular acquisition path leads to signal sparsity, and the neighborhood aggregation method exacerbates the adverse impact of noisy interactions. This paper aims to propose SMAR, a self-supervised mobile application recommendation approach based on GCN, which is designed to overcome existing challenges by using self-supervised learning to create an auxiliary task. Design/methodology/approach In detail, this method uses three distinct data augmentation techniques node dropout, edge dropout and random walk, which create varied perspectives of each node. Then compares these perspectives, aiming to ensure uniformity across different views of the same node while maintaining the differences between separate nodes. Ultimately, auxiliary task is combined with the primary supervised task using a multi-task learning framework, thereby refining the overall mobile application recommendation process. Findings Extensive experiments on two real datasets demonstrate that SMAR achieves better Recall and NDCG performances than other strong baselines, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method. Originality/value In this paper, the authors introduce self-supervised learning into mobile application recommendation approach based on GCNs. This method enhances traditional supervised tasks by using auxiliary task to provide additional information, thereby improving signal accuracy and reducing the influence of noisy interactions in mobile application recommendations.