Exploiting Group-Level Behavior Pattern for Session-Based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation (SBR) is a challenging task, which aims to predict users’ future interests based on anonymous behavior sequences. Existing methods leverage powerful representation learning approaches to encode sessions into a low-dimensional space. However, despite such achievements, the existing studies focus on the instance-level session learning, while neglecting the group-level users’ preferences (e.g., the common preferences of group users in repeat consumption). To this end, we propose a novel
R
epeat-aware
N
eural
M
echanism for
S
ession-based
R
ecommendation (RNMSR). In RNMSR, we propose to learn the user preference from two levels: (i)
instance-level
, which employs GNNs on a similarity-based item-pairwise session graph to capture the users’ preference in instance-level. (ii)
group-level
, which converts sessions into group-level behavior patterns to model the group-level users’ preferences. In RNMSR, we combine instance-level and group-level user preference to model the repeat consumption of users, i.e., whether users take repeated consumption and which items are preferred by users. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets, i.e., Diginetica, Yoochoose, and Nowplaying, demonstrating that the proposed method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in all the tests.