Link Stream Graph for Temporal Recommendations

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Link Stream Graph, a continuous-time model for temporal recommendations, outperforming traditional bipartite and session-based graphs in real-world implicit datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes the Link Stream Graph, a novel continuous-time interaction model that captures detailed temporal dynamics for improved recommender system performance.

Findings

LSG outperforms BIP and STG in 9 out of 12 cases

Continuous-time modeling captures more detailed user-item interactions

Experimental results on four datasets validate the effectiveness of LSG

Abstract

Several researches on recommender systems are based on explicit rating data, but in many real world e-commerce platforms, ratings are not always available, and in those situations, recommender systems have to deal with implicit data such as users' purchase history, browsing history and streaming history. In this context, classical bipartite user-item graphs (BIP) are widely used to compute top-N recommendations. However, these graphs have some limitations, particularly in terms of taking temporal dynamic into account. This is not good because users' preference change over time. To overcome this limit, the Session-based Temporal Graph (STG) was proposed by Xiang et al. to combine long- and short-term preferences in a graph-based recommender system. But in the STG, time is divided into slices and therefore considered discontinuously. This approach loses details of the real temporal dynamics of user actions. To address this challenge, we propose the Link Stream Graph (LSG) which is an extension of link stream representation proposed by Latapy et al. and which allows to model interactions between users and items by considering time continuously. Experiments conducted on four real world implicit datasets for temporal recommendation, with 3 evaluation metrics, show that LSG is the best in 9 out of 12 cases compared to BIP and STG which are the most used state-of-the-art recommender graphs.