GIMIRec: Global Interaction Information Aware Multi-Interest Framework for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Sequential recommendation based on multi-interest framework models the user's recent interaction sequence into multiple different interest vectors, since a single low-dimensional vector cannot fully represent the diversity of user interests. However, most existing models only intercept users' recent interaction behaviors as training data, discarding a large amount of historical interaction sequences. This may raise two issues. On the one hand, data reflecting multiple interests of users is missing; on the other hand, the co-occurrence between items in historical user-item interactions is not fully explored. To tackle the two issues, this paper proposes a novel sequential recommendation model called "Global Interaction Aware Multi-Interest Framework for Sequential Recommendation (GIMIRec)". Specifically, a global context extraction module is firstly proposed without introducing any external information, which calculates a weighted co-occurrence matrix based on the constrained co-occurrence number of each item pair and their time interval from the historical interaction sequences of all users and then obtains the global context embedding of each item by using a simplified graph convolution. Secondly, the time interval of each item pair in the recent interaction sequence of each user is captured and combined with the global context item embedding to get the personalized item embedding. Finally, a self-attention based multi-interest framework is applied to learn the diverse interests of users for sequential recommendation. Extensive experiments on the three real-world datasets of Amazon-Books, Taobao-Buy and Amazon-Hybrid show that the performance of GIMIRec on the Recall, NDCG and Hit Rate indicators is significantly superior to that of the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed global context extraction module can be easily transplanted to most sequential recommendation models.