Hierarchical User Intention-Preference for Sequential Recommendation with Relation-Aware Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding

Existing recommender systems usually make recommendations by exploiting the binary relationship between users and items, and assume that users only have flat preferences for items. They ignore the users' intentions as an origin and driving force for users' performance. Cognitive science tells us that users' preference comes from an explicit intention. They first have an intention to possess a particular (type of) item(s) and then their preferences emerge when facing multiple available options. Most of the data used in recommender systems are composed of heterogeneous information contained in a complicated network's structure. Learning effective representations from these heterogeneous information networks (HINs) can help capture the user's intention and preferences, therefore, improving recommendation performance. We propose a hierarchical user's intention and preferences modeling for sequential recommendation based on relation-aware HIN embedding (HIP-RHINE). We first construct a multirelational semantic space of heterogeneous information networks to learn node embedding based on specific relations. We then model user's intention and preferences using hierarchical trees. Finally, we leverage the structured decision patterns to learn user's preferences and thereafter make recommendations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we also report on the conducted experiments on three real data sets. The results demonstrated that our model achieves significant improvements in Recall and Mean Reciprocal Rank metrics compared with other baselines.