Heterogeneous Global Graph Neural Networks for Personalized Session-based Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces HG-GNN, a novel heterogeneous global graph neural network that leverages item transition patterns across all sessions to improve personalized session-based recommendations by capturing both current and historical user preferences.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new heterogeneous global graph and a dual-encoder framework to better model user preferences from both current and past sessions, enhancing personalization in recommendations.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three real-world datasets

Effectively captures long-term and short-term user preferences

Utilizes a novel heterogeneous global graph structure

Abstract

Predicting the next interaction of a short-term interaction session is a challenging task in session-based recommendation. Almost all existing works rely on item transition patterns, and neglect the impact of user historical sessions while modeling user preference, which often leads to non-personalized recommendation. Additionally, existing personalized session-based recommenders capture user preference only based on the sessions of the current user, but ignore the useful item-transition patterns from other user's historical sessions. To address these issues, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Global Graph Neural Networks (HG-GNN) to exploit the item transitions over all sessions in a subtle manner for better inferring user preference from the current and historical sessions. To effectively exploit the item transitions over all sessions from users, we propose a novel heterogeneous global graph that contains item transitions of sessions, user-item interactions and global co-occurrence items. Moreover, to capture user preference from sessions comprehensively, we propose to learn two levels of user representations from the global graph via two graph augmented preference encoders. Specifically, we design a novel heterogeneous graph neural network (HGNN) on the heterogeneous global graph to learn the long-term user preference and item representations with rich semantics. Based on the HGNN, we propose the Current Preference Encoder and the Historical Preference Encoder to capture the different levels of user preference from the current and historical sessions, respectively. To achieve personalized recommendation, we integrate the representations of the user current preference and historical interests to generate the final user preference representation. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.