Attentive Hawkes Process Application for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Sequential recommendation systems which aim to predict the users’ future clicking items are essential in both research and industry services. Based on the contextual characteristics of users, a large number of existing methods exploit abundant information from user behavior sequences and gain users’ interests through expressive sequential models like recurrent neural networks and self-attention mechanism to predict the next item. However, the temporal generative process of behavior sequences, which is crucial to the complex relationships and distributions of users’ dynamic preferences, is rarely considered. In this paper, we propose HawRec (Hawkes process based sequential recommendation), which is a new representation learning approach to model the interacted sequences of users from a temporal point process perspective. In particular, we leverage temporal self-attention mechanism to make an analogy to the self-exciting mechanism of Hawkes process. We bring expressive superiority of neural network into the Hawkes process with non-parametric conditional intensity kernel, resulting in more accurate recommendation and inheriting robustness from the temporal point process. Furthermore, extensive experiments conducted on four public benchmarks demonstrate that our HawRec outperforms various baselines of state-of-the-art sequential recommendation.