A Variational Autoencoder Mixture Model for Online Behavior Recommendation

Online behavior recommendation is an attractive research topic related to social media mining. This topic focuses on suggesting suitable behaviors for users in online platforms, including music listening, video watching, e-commerce, to name but a few to improve the user experience, an essential factor for the success of online services. A successful online behavior recommendation system should have the ability to predict behaviors that users used to performs and also suggest behaviors that users never performed before. In this paper, we develop a mixture model that contains two components to address this problem. The first component is the user-specific preference component that represents the habits of users based on their behavior history. The second component is the latent group preference component based on variational autoencoder, a deep generative neural network. This component corresponds to the hidden interests of users and allows us to discover the unseen behavior of users. We conduct experiments on various real-world datasets with different characteristics to show the performance of our model in different situations. The result indicates that our proposed model outperforms the previous mixture models for recommendation problem.