Graph Convolutional Networks With Collaborative Feature Fusion for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation seeks to understand user preferences based on their past actions and predict future interactions with items. Recently, several techniques for sequential recommendation have emerged, primarily leveraging graph convolutional networks (GCNs) for their ability to model relationships effectively. However, real-world scenarios often involve sparse interactions, where early and recent short-term preferences play distinct roles in the recommendation process. Consequently, vanilla GCNs struggle to effectively capture the explicit correlations between these early and recent short-term preferences. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach termed Graph Convolutional Networks with Collaborative Feature Fusion (COFF). Specifically, our method addresses the issue by initially dividing each user interaction sequence into two segments. We then construct two separate graphs for these segments, aiming to capture the user's early and recent short-term preferences independently. To obtain robust prediction, we employ multiple GCNs in a collaborative distillation manner, incorporating a feature fusion module to establish connections between the early and recent short-term preferences. This approach enables a more precise representation of user preferences. Experimental evaluations conducted on five popular sequential recommendation datasets demonstrate that our COFF model outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in terms of recommendation accuracy.