LHGCN: A Laminated Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network for Modeling User–Item Interaction in E-Commerce

The e-commerce data structure is a typical multiplex graph network structure, which allows multiple types of edges between node pairs. However, existing methods that rely on message-passing frameworks are not sufficient to fully exploit the rich information in multiplex graphs. To improve the performance of link prediction, we propose a novel laminated heterogeneous graph convolutional network (LHGCN) consisting of three core modules: a laminate generation module (LGM), an adaptive convolution module (ACM), and a laminate fusion module (LFM). More specifically, the LGM generates symmetric laminates that cover diverse semantics to create rich node representations. Then, the ACM dynamically adjusts the node receptive field and flexibly captures local information, thereby enhancing the representation ability of the node. Through symmetric information propagation across laminates, the LFM combines multiple laminated features to optimize the global representation, which enables our model to accurately predict links. Moreover, an elaborate loss function, consisting of positive sample loss, negative sample loss, and L2 regularization loss, drives the network to preserve critical information. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of link prediction.