Title
Towards Neural Mixture Recommender for Long Range Dependent User Sequences
Abstract
Understanding temporal dynamics has proved to be highly valuable for accurate recommendation. Sequential recommenders have been successful in modeling the dynamics of users and items over time. However, while different model architectures excel at capturing various temporal ranges or dynamics, distinct application contexts require adapting to diverse behaviors. In this paper we examine how to build a model that can make use of different temporal ranges and dynamics depending on the request context. We begin with the analysis of an anonymized Youtube dataset comprising millions of user sequences. We quantify the degree of long-range dependence in these sequences and demonstrate that both short-term and long-term dependent behavioral patterns co-exist. We then propose a neural Multi-temporal-range Mixture Model (M3) as a tailored solution to deal with both short-term and long-term dependencies. Our approach employs a mixture of models, each with a different temporal range. These models are combined by a learned gating mechanism capable of exerting different model combinations given different contextual information. In empirical evaluations on a public dataset and our own anonymized YouTube dataset, M3 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3308558.3313650
WWW '19: The Web Conference on The World Wide Web Conference WWW 2019
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Recommender System, Sequential Prediction, User Modeling
Journal
abs/1902.08588
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6674-8
4
0.48
References 
Authors
44
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiaxi Tang11785.53
francois belletti2514.99
Sagar Jain31235.63
Minmin Chen461342.83
Alex Beutel591736.48
Can Xu6541.73
Ed H. Chi74806371.21