A Multi-Task Graph Neural Network with Variational Graph Auto-Encoders for Session-Based Travel Packages Recommendation

Session-based travel packages recommendation aims to predict users’ next click based on their current and historical sessions recorded by Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Recently, an increasing number of studies attempted to apply Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to the session-based recommendation and obtained promising results. However, most of them do not take full advantage of the explicit latent structure from attributes of items, making learned representations of items less effective and difficult to interpret. Moreover, they only combine historical sessions (long-term preferences) with a current session (short-term preference) to learn a unified representation of users, ignoring the effects of historical sessions for the current session. To this end, this article proposes a novel session-based model named STR-VGAE, which fills subtasks of the travel packages recommendation and variational graph auto-encoders simultaneously. STR-VGAE mainly consists of three components: travel packages encoder, users behaviors encoder, and interaction modeling. Specifically, the travel packages encoder module is used to learn a unified travel package representation from co-occurrence attribute graphs by using multi-view variational graph auto-encoders and a multi-view attention network. The users behaviors encoder module is used to encode user’ historical and current sessions with a personalized GNN, which considers the effects of historical sessions on the current session, and coalesce these two kinds of session representations to learn the high-quality users’ representations by exploiting a gated fusion approach. The interaction modeling module is used to calculate recommendation scores over all candidate travel packages. Extensive experiments on a real-life tourism e-commerce dataset from China show that STR-VGAE yields significant performance advantages over several competitive methods, meanwhile provides an interpretation for the generated recommendation list.