Time Interval-Enhanced Graph Neural Network for Shared-Account Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation

Shared-account cross-domain sequential recommendation (SCSR) task aims to recommend the next item via leveraging the mixed user behaviors in multiple domains. It is gaining immense research attention as more and more users tend to sign up on different platforms and share accounts with others to access domain-specific services. Existing works on SCSR mainly rely on mining sequential patterns via recurrent neural network (RNN)-based models, which suffer from the following limitations: 1) RNN-based methods overwhelmingly target discovering sequential dependencies in single-user behaviors and they are not expressive enough to capture the relationships among multiple entities in SCSR; 2) all existing methods bridge two domains via knowledge transfer in the latent space and ignore the explicit cross-domain graph structure; and 3) none existing studies consider the time interval information among items, which is essential in the sequential recommendation for characterizing different items and learning discriminative representations for them. In this work, we propose a new graph-based solution, namely, time interval-enhanced domain-aware graph convolutional network (TiDA-GCN), to address the above challenges. Specifically, we first link users and items in each domain as a graph. Then, we devise a domain-aware graph convolution network to learn user-specific node representations. To fully account for users’ domain-specific preferences on items, two effective attention mechanisms are further developed to selectively guide the message-passing process. Moreover, to further enhance item- and account-level representation learning, we incorporate the time interval into the message passing and design an account-aware self-attention module for learning items’ interactive characteristics. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method from various aspects.