Multi-relation global context learning for session-based recommendation

Abstract

Purpose

Session-based recommendation aims to predict the user's next preference based on the user's recent activities. Although most existing studies consider the global characteristics of items, they only learn the global characteristics of items based on a single connection relationship, which cannot fully capture the complex transformation relationship between items. We believe that multiple relationships between items in learning sessions can improve the performance of session recommendation tasks and the scalability of recommendation models. At the same time, high-quality global features of the item help to explore the potential common preferences of users.

Design/methodology/approach

This work proposes a session-based recommendation method with a multi-relation global context–enhanced network to capture this global transition relationship. Specifically, we construct a multi-relation global item graph based on a group of sessions, use a graded attention mechanism to learn different types of connection relations independently and obtain the global feature of the item according to the multi-relation weight.

Findings

We did related experiments on three benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed model is superior to the existing state-of-the-art methods, which verifies the effectiveness of our model.

Originality/value

First, we construct a multi-relation global item graph to learn the complex transition relations of the global context of the item and effectively mine the potential association of items between different sessions. Second, our model effectively improves the scalability of the model by obtaining high-quality item global features and enables some previously unconsidered items to make it onto the candidate list.

Citation

Liu, Y., Cao, W. and Cao, G. (2023), "Multi-relation global context learning for session-based recommendation", Data Technologies and Applications, Vol. 57 No. 4, pp. 562-579. https://doi.org/10.1108/DTA-07-2022-0290