Abstract:
Session-based recommendation aims to predict the next item that users will interact based solely on anonymous sessions. In real-life scenarios, the user’s preferences are usually various, and distinguishing different preferences in the session is important. However previous studies focus mostly on the transition modeling between items, ignoring the mining of various user preferences. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Leaping Network (HLN) to explicitly model the users’ multiple preferences by grouping items that share some relationships. We first design a Leap Recurrent Unit (LRU) which is capable of skipping preference-unrelated items and accepting knowledge of previously learned preferences. Then we introduce a Preference Manager (PM) to manage those learned preferences and produce an aggregated preference representation each time LRU reruns. The final output of PM which contains multiple preferences of the user is used to make recommendations. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HLN. Furthermore, the visualization of explicitly learned subsequences also confirms our idea.