Interactive Sequential Basket Recommendation by Learning Basket Couplings and Positive/Negative Feedback

Abstract

Sequential recommendation, such as next-basket recommender systems (NBRS), which model users’ sequential behaviors and the relevant context/session, has recently attracted much attention from the research community. Existing session-based NBRS involve session representation and inter-basket relations but ignore their hybrid couplings with the intra-basket items, often producing irrelevant or similar items in the next basket. In addition, they do not predict next-baskets (more than one next basket recommended). Interactive recommendation further involves user feedback on the recommended basket. The existing work on next-item recommendation involves positive feedback on selected items but ignores negative feedback on unselected ones. Here, we introduce a new setting—interactive sequential basket recommendation, which iteratively predicts next baskets by learning the intra-/inter-basket couplings between items and both positive and negative user feedback on recommended baskets. A hierarchical attentive encoder-decoder model (HAEM) continuously recommends next baskets one after another during sequential interactions with users after analyzing the item relations both within a basket and between adjacent sequential baskets (i.e., intra-/inter-basket couplings) and incorporating the user selection and unselection (i.e., positive/negative) feedback on the recommended baskets to refine NBRS. HAEM comprises a basket encoder and a sequence decoder to model intra-/inter-basket couplings and a prediction decoder to sequentially predict next-baskets by interactive feedback-based refinement. Empirical analysis shows that HAEM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines for NBRS and session-based recommenders for accurate and novel recommendation. We also show the effect of continuously refining sequential basket recommendation by including unselection feedback during interactive recommendation.