Eco-Aware Graph Neural Networks for Sustainable Recommendations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the environmental impact of GNN-based recommender systems, evaluating their energy consumption and carbon footprint to promote sustainable AI practices in recommendation technology.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the carbon emissions of GNN models in recommendation systems, addressing an overlooked aspect of their environmental impact.

Findings

Different GNN architectures vary in energy consumption and carbon footprint.

Model complexity and hardware significantly influence environmental impact.

The study promotes eco-friendly design considerations for GNN-based recommenders.

Abstract

Recommender systems play a crucial role in alleviating information overload by providing personalized recommendations tailored to users' preferences and interests. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for recommender systems, leveraging their ability to effectively capture complex relationships and dependencies between users and items by representing them as nodes in a graph structure. In this study, we investigate the environmental impact of GNN-based recommender systems, an aspect that has been largely overlooked in the literature. Specifically, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the carbon emissions associated with training and deploying GNN models for recommendation tasks. We evaluate the energy consumption and carbon footprint of different GNN architectures and configurations, considering factors such as model complexity, training duration, hardware specifications and embedding size. By addressing the environmental impact of resource-intensive algorithms in recommender systems, this study contributes to the ongoing efforts towards sustainable and responsible artificial intelligence, promoting the development of eco-friendly recommendation technologies that balance performance and environmental considerations. Code is available at: https://github.com/antoniopurificato/gnn_recommendation_and_environment.