Session-aware Information Embedding for E-commerce Product Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a session-aware deep learning approach for e-commerce recommendations that effectively models limited anonymous user behaviors within sessions, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel list-wise neural network architecture with a session embedding technique for modeling anonymous user behaviors in e-commerce.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly

Effective modeling of limited user behaviors within sessions

Validated on real e-commerce dataset

Abstract

Most of the existing recommender systems assume that user's visiting history can be constantly recorded. However, in recent online services, the user identification may be usually unknown and only limited online user behaviors can be used. It is of great importance to model the temporal online user behaviors and conduct recommendation for the anonymous users. In this paper, we propose a list-wise deep neural network based architecture to model the limited user behaviors within each session. To train the model efficiently, we first design a session embedding method to pre-train a session representation, which incorporates different kinds of user search behaviors such as clicks and views. Based on the learnt session representation, we further propose a list-wise ranking model to generate the recommendation result for each anonymous user session. We conduct quantitative experiments on a recently published dataset from an e-commerce company. The evaluation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can outperform the state-of-the-art significantly.