Micro Behaviors: A New Perspective in E-commerce Recommender Systems

The explosive popularity of e-commerce sites has reshaped users» shopping habits and an increasing number of users prefer to spend more time shopping online. This evolution allows e-commerce sites to observe rich data about users. The majority of traditional recommender systems have focused on the macro interactions between users and items, i.e., the purchase history of a customer. However, within each macro interaction between a user and an item, the user actually performs a sequence of micro behaviors, which indicate how the user locates the item, what activities the user conducts on the item (e.g., reading the comments, carting, and ordering) and how long the user stays with the item. Such micro behaviors offer fine-grained and deep understandings about users and provide tremendous opportunities to advance recommender systems in e-commerce. However, exploiting micro behaviors for recommendations is rather limited, which motivates us to investigate e-commerce recommendations from a micro-behavior perspective in this paper. Particularly, we uncover the effects of micro behaviors on recommendations and propose an interpretable Recommendation framework RIB, which models inherently the sequence of mIcro Behaviors and their effects. Experimental results on datasets from a real e-commence site demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the importance of micro behaviors for recommendations.