Handling sparsity and seasonality problems simultaneously in session-based recommender systems using graph collaborative filtering

Session-based recommender systems have evolved as a new paradigm in recent years, intending to capture short-term yet dynamic user preferences to give more timely and accurate suggestions that are responsive to the change in their session contexts. However, sparse data for user-item interaction has been one of the significant essential issues as we need a colossal amount of memory to store those sparse data. Seasonality is another major issue in recommendation systems as there are many variations in the pattern of customers’ interests at different time intervals. In our study, we resolve the above mentioned issues by using graph collaborative filtering and creating feature bins. As a case study, we used sequential data from YooChoose customers to validate the efficacy of our proposed methodology. Further, we use five state-of-the-art graph neural network models to get the best recommendation. The performance of those models is evaluated using the NDCG (Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain) and ROC-AUC (Area under the Receiver operating characteristic curve) metrics. In our study, we find out that Residual Gated Convolutional Neural Network with four layers and Adam optimizer gave the best recommendations.