An Adaptive, Context-Aware, and Stacked Attention Network-Based Recommendation System to Capture Users’ Temporal Preference

Recommendation systems have become more important since the widespread use of the Internet. The large amount of information means that it is difficult for users to discover what they really need. However, users’ preferences can change over time because of the age and the impact of social networks. Recommendation systems must capture users’ preferences and recommend suitable items, which is a difficult challenge. This study proposes a novel recommendation system that adapts to the changing preferences of users. By learning and adapting to users’ changing preferences better recommendations are provided. This study uses context factors as additional information to model users’ preferences more accurately. For the proposed recommendation system, the context is based on users’ most recent interaction items. This study proposes two novel attention mechanisms for the recommendation system. The contextual item attention module captures contextual information, changing pattern in users’ preference and the importance of items. The multi-head attention module extends the diversity of users’ preferences and adapts to changing preferences. The recommendation performance is improved using additional item's temporal information to model the contextual item's representation. Experiments compare the proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art recommendation methods using three real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed context-aware recommendation model outperforms traditional methods and demonstrate the effectiveness with which contextual information is captured by the attention mechanism.