Category-based and Popularity-guided Video Game Recommendation: A Balance-oriented Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces CPGRec, a balanced video game recommender system that enhances accuracy and diversity by leveraging game categories, popularity, and a novel reweighting method, validated on the Steam dataset.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel framework, CPGRec, integrating accuracy, diversity, and balance modules to improve video game recommendations over existing methods.

Findings

CPGRec improves recommendation accuracy on Steam dataset.

The framework enhances diversity by leveraging game categories and popularity.

Experimental results show balanced recommendations outperform baselines.

Abstract

In recent years, the video game industry has experienced substantial growth, presenting players with a vast array of game choices. This surge in options has spurred the need for a specialized recommender system tailored for video games. However, current video game recommendation approaches tend to prioritize accuracy over diversity, potentially leading to unvaried game suggestions. In addition, the existing game recommendation methods commonly lack the ability to establish strict connections between games to enhance accuracy. Furthermore, many existing diversity-focused methods fail to leverage crucial item information, such as item category and popularity during neighbor modeling and message propagation. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, called CPGRec, comprising three modules, namely accuracy-driven, diversity-driven, and comprehensive modules. The first module extends the state-of-the-art accuracy-focused game recommendation method by connecting games in a more stringent manner to enhance recommendation accuracy. The second module connects neighbors with diverse categories within the proposed game graph and harnesses the advantages of popular game nodes to amplify the influence of long-tail games within the player-game bipartite graph, thereby enriching recommendation diversity. The third module combines the above two modules and employs a new negative-sample rating score reweighting method to balance accuracy and diversity. Experimental results on the Steam dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving game recommendations. The dataset and source codes are anonymously released at: https://github.com/CPGRec2024/CPGRec.git.