Time Highlighted Multi-Interest Network for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation based on a multi-interest framework aims to analyze different aspects of interest based on historical interactions and generate predictions of a user’s potential interest in a list of items. Most existing methods only focus on what are the multiple interests behind interactions but neglect the evolution of user interests over time. To explore the impact of temporal dynamics on interest extraction, this paper explicitly models the timestamp with a multi-interest network and proposes a time-highlighted network to learn user preferences, which considers not only the interests at different moments but also the possible trends of interest over time. More specifically, the time intervals between historical interactions and prediction moments are first mapped to vectors. Meanwhile, a time-attentive aggregation layer is designed to capture the trends of items in the sequence over time, where the time intervals are seen as additional information to distinguish the importance of different neighbors. Then, the learned items’ transition trends are aggregated with the items themselves by a gated unit. Finally, a self-attention network is deployed to capture multiple interests with the obtained temporal information vectors. Extensive experiments are carried out based on three real-world datasets and the results convincingly establish the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art baselines in terms of model performance.