BA-GNN: Behavior-aware graph neural network for session-based recommendation

Yongquan Liang, Qiuyu Song, Zhongying Zhao, Hui Zhou, Maoguo Gong

Abstract: Session-based recommendation is a popular research topic that aims to predict users’ next possible interactive item by exploiting anonymous sessions. The existing studies mainly focus on making predictions by considering users’ single interactive behavior. Some recent efforts have been made to exploit multiple interactive behaviors, but they generally ignore the influences of different interactive behaviors and the noise in interactive sequences. To address these problems, we propose a behavior-aware graph neural network for session-based recommendation. First, different interactive sequences are modeled as directed graphs. Thus, the item representations are learned via graph neural networks. Then, a sparse self-attention module is designed to remove the noise in behavior sequences. Finally, the representations of different behavior sequences are aggregated with the gating mechanism to obtain the session representations. Experimental results on two public datasets show that our proposed method outperforms all competitive baselines. The source code is available at the website of GitHub.