Advances in session-based and session-aware recommendation

As of today, personalized item suggestions provided by an automated recommender system have become a crucial part of many online services, e.g., online shops or media streaming applications, and extensive evidence exists that such systems increase both the user experience as well as the revenue of the providers. In academia, the recommendation problem is often framed as finding suitable items that a user is not yet aware of based on his long-term preference profile. In the real world, however, this problem formulation has a number of problems. Long-term profiles, e.g., are not available for new or anonymous users and recommendations can then only be based on the few most recent interactions in an ongoing usage session. Various approaches to this highly relevant setting of session-based recommendation that recently emerged in the research community were proposed over the recent years. However, in terms of the evaluation procedure, no common standard has been established so far. In this thesis, the author, therefore, proposes a publicly available framework for reproducible research and, furthermore, fairly compares many approaches, of which some were proposed by himself. Extensive experiments and a user study surprisingly showed that comparably simple nearest-neighbor techniques usually outperform recent deep learning models across many domains, datasets, and metrics. Even if long-term preferences are available for the users, recent works indicated that it might still be beneficial to consider the ongoing session, e.g., because a user started the session with a specific intent in mind. The author of this thesis, thus, conducted a systematic statistical analysis to assess what helps recommendations in being effective in such a session-aware scenario. This analysis is based on log data from a fashion retailer and insights were, furthermore, operationalized into novel session-aware recommendation approaches. Matching items of the customer’s ongoing session, reminding him of previously inspected clothes, recommending discounted items, and considering recent trends in the community showed to be particularly effective strategies, not only for item-item recommendation but also in the related scenario of search personalization

Empirical analysis of session-based recommendation algorithms

Recommender systems are tools that support online users by pointing them to potential items of interest in situations of information overload. In recent years, the class of session-based recommendation algorithms received more attention in the research literature. These algorithms base their recommendations solely on the observed interactions with the user in an ongoing session and do not require the existence of long-term preference profiles. Most recently, a number of deep learning-based (“neural”) approaches to session-based recommendations have been proposed. However, previous research indicates that today’s complex neural recommendation methods are not always better than comparably simple algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy. With this work, our goal is to shed light on the state of the art in the area of session-based recommendation and on the progress that is made with neural approaches. For this purpose, we compare twelve algorithmic approaches, among them six recent neural methods, under identical conditions on various datasets. We find that the progress in terms of prediction accuracy that is achieved with neural methods is still limited. In most cases, our experiments show that simple heuristic methods based on nearest-neighbors schemes are preferable over conceptually and computationally more complex methods. Observations from a user study furthermore indicate that recommendations based on heuristic methods were also well accepted by the study participants. To support future progress and reproducibility in this area, we publicly share the session-rec evaluation framework that was used in our research

Session-based item recommendation in e-commerce: on short-term intents, reminders, trends and discounts

In our article Session-based item recommendation in e-commerce: on short-term intents, reminders, trends and discounts accepted for publication in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (UMUAI) we examined a classification-based approach to analyze what makes a recommendation successful. In the process we generated over 95 features for each single recommendation action in our data set provided by the online fashion retailer Zalando. Due to space issues we could only explain some of the most relevant features in the article itself. As an addition, the following table lists all investigated features in detail. Furthermore, in our article we reported the top ten feature weights regarding the label prediction calculated by the methods Gain ratio and Chi-squared to highlight the most important success signals. Here, we additionally reveal the weights for all features and also include the Information gain ratio and the Gini index

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