Intention Modeling from Ordered and Unordered Facets for Sequential Recommendation

Recently, sequential recommendation has attracted substantial attention from researchers due to its status as an essential service for e-commerce. Accurately understanding user intention is an important factor to improve the performance of recommendation system. However, user intention is highly time-dependent and flexible, so it is very challenging to learn the latent dynamic intention of users for sequential recommendation. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel intention modeling from ordered and unordered facets (IMfOU) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, the global and local item embedding (GLIE) we proposed can comprehensively capture the sequential context information in the sequences and highlight the important features that users care about. We further design ordered preference drift learning (OPDL) and unordered purchase motivation learning (UPML) to obtain user’s the process of preference drift and purchase motivation respectively. With combining the users’ dynamic preference and current motivation, it considers not only sequential dependencies between items but also flexible dependencies and models the user purchase intention more accurately from ordered and unordered facets respectively. Evaluation results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods achieving improvement of AUC by an average of 2.26%.