Modeling the Heterogeneous Duration of User Interest in Time-Dependent Recommendation: A Hidden Semi-Markov Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hidden semi-Markov model for time-dependent recommender systems that captures heterogeneous durations of user interests, improving prediction accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

It extends existing models by incorporating variable interest durations using a hidden semi-Markov approach, enabling better modeling of user interest dynamics.

Findings

Significantly outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks

Effectively captures heterogeneity in user interest durations

Improves understanding of interest drift in datasets

Abstract

Recommender systems are widely used for suggesting books, education materials, and products to users by exploring their behaviors. In reality, users' preferences often change over time, leading to studies on time-dependent recommender systems. However, most existing approaches that deal with time information remain primitive. In this paper, we extend existing methods and propose a hidden semi-Markov model to track the change of users' interests. Particularly, this model allows for capturing the different durations of user stays in a (latent) interest state, which can better model the heterogeneity of user interests and focuses. We derive an expectation maximization algorithm to estimate the parameters of the framework and predict users' actions. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art time-dependent and static benchmark methods. Further analyses of the experiment results indicate that the performance improvement is related to the heterogeneity of state durations and the drift of user interests in the dataset.