FuzzAttention on Session-based Recommender System

Abstract

mender system is studied widely and has been implemented successfully into businesses and daily lives. Its primary purpose is to analyze user behaviors to predict the next item of interest. To enrich user information, a session-based recommender system considers the user’s historical records in the session. This information includes the user’s general and current interests as additional information to improve the performance of the model such that the next item can be recommended easily. However, the recommender system not only considers the prediction performance but also regards the interpretability as a major target. For enhancing the interpretability and performance, we propose a novel mechanism, i.e., FuzzAttention, based on the attention mechanism that is applied widely to deep-learning models. In FuzzAttention, we utilize a fuzzy neural network to build a fuzzy inference system; therefore, we adopt joint learning to learn the parameters in the session-based recommendation and the fuzzy neural network jointly. In the experiments, we used two types of session-based recommender systems and conducted them on two datasets including the session-based information to compare the model performance based on the traditional attention mechanism and FuzzAttention. The results indicate that our proposed mechanism can improve the performance to predict the next item and the model’s interpretability.