HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (Extended abstract)

Sequential recommendation aims to identify and recommend the next few items of users’ interest. It becomes an effective tool to help users select their favorite items from a variety of options. A key challenge in sequential recommendation is to learn the patterns and dynamics, which are most pertinent to inform future interactions of users. With the prosperity of deep learning, many deep models, particularly based on recurrent neural networks [1] and with attention mechanisms [2] , [3] , have been developed for sequential recommendation purposes. However, our analysis demonstrates that, these deep models, particularly those with attention mechanisms, may not always learn meaningful attention weights from the extremely sparse recommendation data, and thus, could degrade the recommendation performance. Therefore, in this study, instead of deep models, we develop novel, effective and efficient hybrid associations models (HAM) to better learn from the sparse and limited recommendation data. This study has been published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Please refer to the full manuscript [4] for more details.