Personalizing Session-based Recommendations with Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks

ABSTRACT

Session-based recommendations are highly relevant in many modern on-line services (e.g. e-commerce, video streaming) and recommendation settings. Recently, Recurrent Neural Networks have been shown to perform very well in session-based settings. While in many session-based recommendation domains user identifiers are hard to come by, there are also domains in which user profiles are readily available. We propose a seamless way to personalize RNN models with cross-session information transfer and devise a Hierarchical RNN model that relays end evolves latent hidden states of the RNNs across user sessions. Results on two industry datasets show large improvements over the session-only RNNs.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Machine learning

    • Machine learning approaches

      • Neural networks

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Retrieval tasks and goals

      • Recommender systems