Sequential Recommender System based on Hierarchical Attention Networks

Abstract

With a large amount of user activity data accumulated, it is crucial to exploit user sequential behavior for sequential recommendations. Conventionally, user general taste and recent demand are combined to promote recommendation performances. However, existing methods often neglect that user long-term preference keep evolving over time, and building a static representation for user general taste may not adequately reflect the dynamic characters. Moreover, they integrate user-item or item-item interactions through a linear way which limits the capability of model. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel two-layer hierarchical attention network, which takes the above properties into account, to recommend the next item user might be interested. Specifically, the first attention layer learns user long-term preferences based on the historical purchased item representation, while the second one outputs final user representation through coupling user long-term and short-term preferences. The experimental study demonstrates the superiority of our method compared with other state-of-the-art ones.