Recurrent neural networks with top-k gains for session-based recommendations

B Hidasi, A Karatzoglou - Proceedings of the 27th ACM international …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on information and …, 2018dl.acm.org
RNNs have been shown to be excellent models for sequential data and in particular for data
that is generated by users in an session-based manner. The use of RNNs provides
impressive performance benefits over classical methods in session-based
recommendations. In this work we introduce novel ranking loss functions tailored to RNNs in
the recommendation setting. The improved performance of these losses over alternatives,
along with further tricks and refinements described in this work, allow for an overall …
RNNs have been shown to be excellent models for sequential data and in particular for data that is generated by users in an session-based manner. The use of RNNs provides impressive performance benefits over classical methods in session-based recommendations. In this work we introduce novel ranking loss functions tailored to RNNs in the recommendation setting. The improved performance of these losses over alternatives, along with further tricks and refinements described in this work, allow for an overall improvement of up to 35% in terms of MRR and Recall@20 over previous session-based RNN solutions and up to 53% over classical collaborative filtering approaches. Unlike data augmentation-based improvements, our method does not increase training times significantly. We further demonstrate the performance gain of the RNN over baselines in an online A/B test.
ACM Digital Library