Explainable Integration of Social Media Background in a Dynamic Neural Recommender

Abstract

Recommender systems nowadays are commonly deployed in e-commerce platforms to help customers making purchase decisions. Dynamic recommender considers not only static user-item interaction data, but the temporal information at the time of recommendation. Previous researches have suggested to incorporate social media as the temporal information in dynamic neural recommenders after transforming them into embeddings. While such an approach can potentially improve recommendation performance, the effectiveness is difficult to explain. In this article, we propose an explainable method to integrate social media in a dynamic neural recommender. Our method applies association rule mining, which can generate human-understandable behavior patterns from social media and e-commerce platforms. With real-world social media and e-commerce data, we show that the integration can improve accuracy by up to 14% while using the same data. Moreover, we can explain the positive cases by examining relevant association rules.