Learning Hierarchical Representation Model for NextBasket Recommendation

Pengfei Wang, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan, Jun Xu, Shengxian Wan, Xueqi Cheng

Abstract: Next basket recommendation is a crucial task in market basket analysis. Given a user's purchase history, usually a sequence of transaction data, one attempts to build a recommender that can predict the next few items that the user most probably would like. Ideally, a good recommender should be able to explore the sequential behavior (i.e., buying one item leads to buying another next), as well as account for users' general taste (i.e., what items a user is typically interested in) for recommendation. Moreover, these two factors may interact with each other to influence users' next purchase. To tackle the above problems, in this paper, we introduce a novel recommendation approach, namely hierarchical representation model (HRM). HRM can well capture both sequential behavior and users' general taste by involving transaction and user representations in prediction. Meanwhile, the flexibility of applying different aggregation operations, especially nonlinear operations, on representations allows us to model complicated interactions among different factors. Theoretically, we show that our model subsumes several existing methods when choosing proper aggregation operations. Empirically, we demonstrate that our model can consistently outperform the state-of-the-art baselines under different evaluation metrics on real-world transaction data.