Causal Incremental Graph Convolution for Recommender System Retraining

Real-world recommender system needs to be regularly retrained to keep with the new data. In this work, we consider how to efficiently retrain graph convolution network (GCN) based recommender models, which are state-of-the-art techniques for collaborative recommendation. To pursue high efficiency, we set the target as using only new data for model updating, meanwhile not sacrificing the recommendation accuracy compared with full model retraining. This is non-trivial to achieve, since the interaction data participates in both the graph structure for model construction and the loss function for model learning, whereas the old graph structure is not allowed to use in model updating. Towards the goal, we propose a \textit{Causal Incremental Graph Convolution} approach, which consists of two new operators named \textit{Incremental Graph Convolution} (IGC) and \textit{Colliding Effect Distillation} (CED) to estimate the output of full graph convolution. In particular, we devise simple and effective modules for IGC to ingeniously combine the old representations and the incremental graph and effectively fuse the long-term and short-term preference signals. CED aims to avoid the out-of-date issue of inactive nodes that are not in the incremental graph, which connects the new data with inactive nodes through causal inference. In particular, CED estimates the causal effect of new data on the representation of inactive nodes through the control of their collider. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate both accuracy gains and significant speed-ups over the existing retraining mechanism.