A Multi-view Graph Contrastive Learning Framework for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation methods play an irreplaceable role in recommender systems which can capture the users’ dynamic preferences from the behavior sequences. Despite their success, these works usually suffer from the sparsity problem commonly existed in real applications. Cross-domain sequential recommendation aims to alleviate this problem by introducing relatively richer source-domain data. However, most existing methods capture the users’ preferences independently of each domain, which may neglect the item transition patterns across sequences from different domains, i.e., a user’s interaction in one domain may influence his/her next interaction in other domains. Moreover, the data sparsity problem still exists since some items in the target and source domains are interacted with only a limited number of times. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a generic framework named multi-view graph contrastive learning (MGCL). Specifically, we adopt the contrastive mechanism in an intra-domain item representation view and an inter-domain user preference view. The former is to jointly learn the dynamic sequential information in the user sequence graph and the static collaborative information in the cross-domain global graph, while the latter is to capture the complementary information of the user’s preferences from different domains. Extensive empirical studies on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our MGCL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.