With the research directions described in this thesis, we seek to address the
critical challenges in designing recommender systems that can understand the
dynamics of continuous-time event sequences. We follow a ground-up approach,
i.e., first, we address the problems that may arise due to the poor quality of
CTES data being fed into a recommender system. Later, we handle the task of
designing accurate recommender systems. To improve the quality of the CTES
data, we address a fundamental problem of overcoming missing events in temporal
sequences. Moreover, to provide accurate sequence modeling frameworks, we
design solutions for points-of-interest recommendation, i.e., models that can
handle spatial mobility data of users to various POI check-ins and recommend
candidate locations for the next check-in. Lastly, we highlight that the
capabilities of the proposed models can have applications beyond recommender
systems, and we extend their abilities to design solutions for large-scale CTES
retrieval and human activity prediction. A significant part of this thesis uses
the idea of modeling the underlying distribution of CTES via neural marked
temporal point processes (MTPP). Traditional MTPP models are stochastic
processes that utilize a fixed formulation to capture the generative mechanism
of a sequence of discrete events localized in continuous time. In contrast,
neural MTPP combine the underlying ideas from the point process literature with
modern deep learning architectures. The ability of deep-learning models as
accurate function approximators has led to a significant gain in the predictive
prowess of neural MTPP models. In this thesis, we utilize and present several
neural network-based enhancements for the current MTPP frameworks for the
aforementioned real-world applications.Comment: Ph.D. Thesis (2022