Recurrent Collaborative Filtering for Unifying General and Sequential Recommender

Abstract

General recommender and sequential recommender are two commonly applied modeling paradigms for recommendation tasks. General recommender focuses on modeling the general user preferences, ignoring the sequential patterns in user behaviors; whereas sequential recommender focuses on exploring the item-to-item sequential relations, failing to model the global user preferences. In addition, better recommendation performance has recently been achieved by adopting an approach to combine them. However, previous approaches are unable to solve both tasks in a unified way and cannot capture the whole historical sequential information. In this paper, we propose a recommendation model named Recurrent Collaborative Filtering (RCF), which unifies both paradigms within a single model.Specifically, we combine recurrent neural network (the sequential recommender part) and matrix factorization model (the general recommender part) in a multi-task learning framework, where we perform joint optimization with shared model parameters enforcing the two parts to regularize each other. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate on MovieLens and Netflix datasets that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across the tasks of both sequential and general recommender.