Price DOES Matter! Modeling Price and Interest Preferences in Session-based Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoHHN, a novel hypergraph-based model that incorporates both price and interest preferences to improve session-based recommendation accuracy, addressing the challenge of heterogeneous information and complex preference relations.

Contribution

The paper proposes a co-guided hypergraph network that models price and interest preferences simultaneously, a novel approach in session-based recommendation.

Findings

CoHHN outperforms existing methods on three real-world datasets.

Price significantly influences user purchase decisions.

The model effectively captures complex relations between price and interest preferences.

Abstract

Session-based recommendation aims to predict items that an anonymous user would like to purchase based on her short behavior sequence. The current approaches towards session-based recommendation only focus on modeling users' interest preferences, while they all ignore a key attribute of an item, i.e., the price. Many marketing studies have shown that the price factor significantly influences users' behaviors and the purchase decisions of users are determined by both price and interest preferences simultaneously. However, it is nontrivial to incorporate price preferences for session-based recommendation. Firstly, it is hard to handle heterogeneous information from various features of items to capture users' price preferences. Secondly, it is difficult to model the complex relations between price and interest preferences in determining user choices. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel method Co-guided Heterogeneous Hypergraph Network (CoHHN) for session-based recommendation. Towards the first challenge, we devise a heterogeneous hypergraph to represent heterogeneous information and rich relations among them. A dual-channel aggregating mechanism is then designed to aggregate various information in the heterogeneous hypergraph. After that, we extract users' price preferences and interest preferences via attention layers. As to the second challenge, a co-guided learning scheme is designed to model the relations between price and interest preferences and enhance the learning of each other. Finally, we predict user actions based on item features and users' price and interest preferences. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CoHHN. Further analysis reveals the significance of price for session-based recommendation.