Long and Short-Term Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent neural networks have recently been successfully applied to the session-based recommendation problem, and is part of a growing interest for collaborative filtering based on sequence prediction. This new approach to recommendations reveals an aspect that was previously overlooked: the difference between short-term and long-term recommendations. In this work we characterize the full short-term/long-term profile of many collaborative filtering methods, and we show how recurrent neural networks can be steered towards better short or long-term predictions. We also show that RNNs are not only adapted to session-based collaborative filtering, but are perfectly suited for collaborative filtering on dense datasets where it outperforms traditional item recommendation algorithms.