No Arabic abstract
Boosting sales of e-commerce services is guaranteed once users find more matching items to their interests in a short time. Consequently, recommendation systems have become a crucial part of any successful e-commerce services. Although various recommendation techniques could be used in e-commerce, a considerable amount of attention has been drawn to session-based recommendation systems during the recent few years. This growing interest is due to the security concerns in collecting personalized user behavior data, especially after the recent general data protection regulations. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches used in the session-based recommendation. In session-based recommendation, a recommendation system counts on the sequence of events made by a user within the same session to predict and endorse other items that are more likely to correlate with his/her preferences. Our extensive experiments investigate baseline techniques (textit{e.g.,} nearest neighbors and pattern mining algorithms) and deep learning approaches (textit{e.g.,} recurrent neural networks, graph neural networks, and attention-based networks). Our evaluations show that advanced neural-based models and session-based nearest neighbor algorithms outperform the baseline techniques in most of the scenarios. However, we found that these models suffer more in case of long sessions when there exists drift in user interests, and when there is no enough data to model different items correctly during training. Our study suggests that using hybrid models of different approaches combined with baseline algorithms could lead to substantial results in session-based recommendations based on dataset characteristics. We also discuss the drawbacks of current session-based recommendation algorithms and further open research directions in this field.
Nowadays, E-commerce is increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Meanwhile, shopping process has also changed incrementally from one behavior (purchase) to multiple behaviors (such as view, carting and purchase). Therefore, utilizing interaction data of auxiliary behavior data draws a lot of attention in the E-commerce recommender systems. However, all existing models ignore two kinds of intrinsic heterogeneity which are helpful to capture the difference of user preferences and the difference of item attributes. First (intra-heterogeneity), each user has multiple social identities with otherness, and these different identities can result in quite different interaction preferences. Second (inter-heterogeneity), each item can transfer an item-specific percentage of score from low-level behavior to high-level behavior for the gradual relationship among multiple behaviors. Thus, the lack of consideration of these heterogeneities damages recommendation rank performance. To model the above heterogeneities, we propose a novel method named intra- and inter-heterogeneity recommendation model (ARGO). Specifically, we embed each user into multiple vectors representing the users identities, and the maximum of identity scores indicates the interaction preference. Besides, we regard the item-specific transition percentage as trainable transition probability between different behaviors. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that ARGO performs much better than the state-of-the-art in multi-behavior scenarios.
Category recommendation for users on an e-Commerce platform is an important task as it dictates the flow of traffic through the website. It is therefore important to surface precise and diverse category recommendations to aid the users journey through the platform and to help them discover new groups of items. An often understated part in category recommendation is users proclivity to repeat purchases. The structure of this temporal behavior can be harvested for better category recommendations and in this work, we attempt to harness this through variational inference. Further, to enhance the variational inference based optimization, we initialize the optimizer at better starting points through the well known Metapath2Vec algorithm. We demonstrate our results on two real-world datasets and show that our model outperforms standard baseline methods.
Session-based recommendation (SBR) learns users preferences by capturing the short-term and sequential patterns from the evolution of user behaviors. Among the studies in the SBR field, graph-based approaches are a relatively powerful kind of way, which generally extract item information by message aggregation under Euclidean space. However, such methods cant effectively extract the hierarchical information contained among consecutive items in a session, which is critical to represent users preferences. In this paper, we present a hyperbolic contrastive graph recommender (HCGR), a principled session-based recommendation framework involving Lorentz hyperbolic space to adequately capture the coherence and hierarchical representations of the items. Within this framework, we design a novel adaptive hyperbolic attention computation to aggregate the graph message of each users preference in a session-based behavior sequence. In addition, contrastive learning is leveraged to optimize the item representation by considering the geodesic distance between positive and negative samples in hyperbolic space. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that HCGR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 0.43$%$-28.84$%$ in terms of $HitRate$, $NDCG$ and $MRR$.
Session-based recommendation aims at predicting the next item given a sequence of previous items consumed in the session, e.g., on e-commerce or multimedia streaming services. Specifically, session data exhibits some unique characteristics, i.e., session consistency and sequential dependency over items within the session, repeated item consumption, and session timeliness. In this paper, we propose simple-yet-effective linear models for considering the holistic aspects of the sessions. The comprehensive nature of our models helps improve the quality of session-based recommendation. More importantly, it provides a generalized framework for reflecting different perspectives of session data. Furthermore, since our models can be solved by closed-form solutions, they are highly scalable. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed linear models show competitive or state-of-the-art performance in various metrics on several real-world datasets.
Building a recommendation system that serves billions of users on daily basis is a challenging problem, as the system needs to make astronomical number of predictions per second based on real-time user behaviors with O(1) time complexity. Such kind of large scale recommendation systems usually rely heavily on pre-built index of products to speedup the recommendation service so that online user waiting time is un-noticeable. One important indexing structure is the product-product index, where one can retrieval a list of ranked products given a seed product. The index can be viewed as a weighted product-product graph. In this paper, we present our novel technologies to efficiently build such kind of indexed product graphs. In particular, we propose the Swing algorithm to capture the substitute relationships between products, which can utilize the substructures of user-item click bi-partitive graph. Then we propose the Surprise algorithm for the modeling of complementary product relationships, which utilizes product category information and solves the sparsity problem of user co-purchasing graph via clustering technique. Base on these two approaches, we can build the basis product graph for recommendation in Taobao. The approaches are evaluated comprehensively with both offline and online experiments, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the work.