Learning Neighbor User Intention on User-Item Interaction Graphs for Better Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

The task of Sequential Recommendation aims to predict the user’s preference by analyzing the user’s historical behaviours. Existing methods model item transitions through leveraging sequential patterns. However, they mainly consider the target user’s own behaviours and dynamic characteristics, while often ignore the high-order collaborative connections when modelling user preferences. Some recent works try to use graph-based methods to introduce high-order collaborative signals for Sequential Recommendation, but they have two main problems. One is that the sequential patterns cannot be effectively mined, and the other is that their way of introducing high-order collaborative signals is not very suitable for Sequential Recommendation. To address these problems, we propose to fully exploit sequence features and model high-order collaborative signals for Sequential Recommendation. We propose a Neighbor user Intention based Sequential Recommender, namely NISRec, which utilizes the intentions of high-order connected neighbor users as high-order collaborative signals, in order to improve recommendation performance for the target user. To be specific, NISRec contains two main modules: the neighbor user intention embedding module (NIE) and the fusion module. The NIE describes both the long-term and the short-term intentions of neighbor users and aggregates them separately. The fusion module uses these two types of aggregated intentions to model high-order collaborative signals in both the embedding process and the user preference modelling phase for recommendation of the target user. Experimental results show that our new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both sparse and dense datasets. Extensive studies further show the effectiveness of the diverse neighbor intentions introduced by NISRec.