Unsupervised Proxy Selection for Session-based Recommender Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces ProxySR, an unsupervised framework for session-based recommender systems that models user general interest through proxies, significantly improving recommendation accuracy without user-dependent data.

Contribution

ProxySR is a novel unsupervised method that learns proxies to represent user general interest, addressing a key limitation of existing session-based recommender systems.

Findings

ProxySR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets.

Proxies effectively imitate user general interest without user-dependent information.

The framework adapts to scenarios with and without user identifiers.

Abstract

Session-based Recommender Systems (SRSs) have been actively developed to recommend the next item of an anonymous short item sequence (i.e., session). Unlike sequence-aware recommender systems where the whole interaction sequence of each user can be used to model both the short-term interest and the general interest of the user, the absence of user-dependent information in SRSs makes it difficult to directly derive the user's general interest from data. Therefore, existing SRSs have focused on how to effectively model the information about short-term interest within the sessions, but they are insufficient to capture the general interest of users. To this end, we propose a novel framework to overcome the limitation of SRSs, named ProxySR, which imitates the missing information in SRSs (i.e., general interest of users) by modeling proxies of sessions. ProxySR selects a proxy for the input session in an unsupervised manner, and combines it with the encoded short-term interest of the session. As a proxy is jointly learned with the short-term interest and selected by multiple sessions, a proxy learns to play the role of the general interest of a user and ProxySR learns how to select a suitable proxy for an input session. Moreover, we propose another real-world situation of SRSs where a few users are logged-in and leave their identifiers in sessions, and a revision of ProxySR for the situation. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that ProxySR considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors, and the proxies successfully imitate the general interest of the users without any user-dependent information.