Multi-aspect features of items for time-ordered sequential recommendation

Abstract

The key to sequential recommendation modeling is to capture dynamic users’ interests. Existing sequential recommendation methods (e.g., self-attention mechanism) have achieved extraordinary success in modeling users’ interests. However, these models ignore that users have different levels of preferences for different aspects of items, failing to capture users’ most concerning aspects. In addition, they are highly dependent on the quality of training data, which may lead to overfitting of the model when the training data is insufficient. To address the above issues, we propose a novel sequence-aware model (Multi-Aspect Features of Items for Time-Ordered Sequential Recommendation, MFITSRec), which combines the features of items with user behavior sequences to learn more complex item-item and item-attribute relationships. Moreover, the model uses a self-attention network based on an absolute time relationship, which can better represent the changes in users’ interests and capture users’ preferences for particular aspects of items. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms various baseline models. In particular, the model’s prediction accuracy has been significantly improved on sparse datasets.