ICAI-SR: Item Categorical Attribute Integrated Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) has attracted much research attention in the past few years. Most existing attribute integrated SR models do not directly model the complex relations between items and categorical attributes, as well do not exploit the power of attribute sequence in predicting the next item. In this paper, we propose an Item Categorical Attribute Integrated Sequential Recommendation (ICAI-SR) framework, which consists of an Item-Attribute Aggregation (IAA) model and Entity Sequential (ES) models. In IAA model, we employ a heterogeneous graph to represent the complex relations between items and different types of categorical attributes, then the attention mechanism based neighborhood aggregation is designed to model the correlations between items and attributes. For ES models, there are one Item Sequential (IS) model and one or more Attribute Sequential (AS) models. With IS and AS models, not only the item sequence but also the attribute sequence are used to predict the next item during model training. ICAI-SR is instantiated by taking Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) as ES models, resulting in ICAI-GRU and ICAI-BERT respectively. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three public datasets to validate the performance of ICAI-SR. Experimental Results show that ICAI-SR performs better than both basic SR models and a competitive attribute integrated SR model.