Hypergraph-Based Session Modeling: A Multi-Collaborative Self-Supervised Approach for Enhanced Recommender Systems

Xiangping Zheng, Bo Wu, Alex X. Zhang, Wei Li

Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) is a challenging task that involves predicting a user’s next item click based on their recent session history. Presently, many state-of-the-art methodologies employ graph neural networks to model item transitions. Notwithstanding their impressive performance, graph-based models encounter significant challenges when confronted with intricate session dependencies and data sparsity in real-world scenarios, ultimately constraining their capacity to enhance recommendation accuracy. In recognition of these challenges, we introduce an innovative methodology known as ‘Mssen,’ which stands for Multi-collaborative self-supervised learning in hypergraph neural networks. Mssen is meticulously crafted to adeptly discern user intent. Our approach initiates by representing session-based data as a hypergraph, adeptly capturing intricate, high-order relationships. Subsequently, we employ self-supervised learning on item-session hypergraphs to mitigate the challenges of data sparsity, all without necessitating manual fine-tuning, extensive search, or domain-specific expertise in augmentation selection. Comprehensive experimental analyses conducted across multiple datasets consistently underscore the superior performance of our approach when compared to existing methodologies.