A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation

The bloom of the Internet and the recent breakthroughs in deep learning techniques open a new door to AI for E-commence, with a trend of evolving from using a few financial factors such as liquidity and profitability to using more advanced AI techniques to process complex and multi-modal data. In this paper, we tackle the practical problem of restaurant survival prediction. We argue that traditional methods ignore two essential respects, which are very helpful for the task: 1) modeling customer reviews and 2) jointly considering status prediction and result explanation. Thus, we propose a novel joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on the multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. Moreover, we design a graph neural network to capture the high-order interactions and design a co-attention mechanism to capture the most informative and meaningful signal from noisy textual reviews. Our results on two datasets show a significant and consistent improvement over the SOTA techniques (average 6.8% improvement in prediction and 45.3% improvement in explanation).