Knowledge-reinforced explainable next basket recommendation

Abstract

The next basket recommendation task aims to predict the items in the user’s next basket by modeling the user’s basket sequence. Existing next basket recommendations focus on improving recommendation performance, and most of these methods are black-box models, ignoring the importance of providing explanations to improve user satisfaction. Furthermore, most next basket recommendation methods are designed for consumer users, and few methods are proposed for business user characteristics. To address the above problems, we propose a Knowledge Reinforced Explainable Next Basket Recommendation (KRE-NBR). Specifically, we construct a basket-based knowledge graph and obtain pretrained embeddings of entities that contain rich information of the knowledge graph. To obtain high-quality user predictive vectors, we fuse user pretrained embeddings, user basket sequence level embeddings, and user repurchase embeddings. One highlight of the user repurchase embeddings is that they are able to model business user repurchase behavior. To make the results of next basket recommendations explainable, we use reinforcement learning for path reasoning to find the items recommended in the next basket and generate recommendation explanations at the same time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide recommendation explanations for next basket recommendations. Extensive experiments on real datasets show that the recommendation performance of our proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.