A feature-aware long-short interest evolution network for sequential recommendation

Recommendation systems are an effective solution to deal with information overload, particularly in the e-commerce sector, in which sequential recommendation is extensively utilized. Sequential recommendations aim to acquire users’ interests and provide accurate recommendations by analyzing users’ historical interaction sequences. To improve recommendation performance, it is vital to take into account the long- and short-term interests of users. Despite significant advancements in this domain, some issues need to be addressed. Conventional sequential recommendation models typically express each item with a uniform embedding, ignoring evolutionary patterns among item attributes, such as category, brand, and price. Moreover, these models often model users’ long- and short-term interests independently, failing to adequately address the issues of interest drift and short-term interest evolution. This study proposes a new model, the Feature-aware Long-Short Interest Evolution Network (FLSIE), to address the above-mentioned issues. Specifically, the model uses explicit feature embedding to represent item attribute information and employs a two-dimensional (2D) attention mechanism to distinguish the significance of individual features in a specific item and the relevance of each item in the interaction sequence. Furthermore, to avoid the issue of interest drift, the model employs a long-term interest guidance mechanism to enhance the representation of short-term interest and adopts a gated recurrent unit with attentional update gate to model the dynamic evolution of users’ short-term interest. Experimental results indicate that our presented model outperforms existing methods on three real-world datasets.