TRR: Target-relation regulated network for sequential recommendation

Item co-occurrence is an important pattern in recommendation. Due to the difference in correlation, the matching degrees between the target and historical items vary. The higher the matching degree, the greater probability they co-occur. Recently, the recommendation performance has been greatly improved by leveraging item relations. As an important bond imposed by relations, these connected items should have a strong correlation in the calculation of certain measures. This kind of correlation can be the biased knowledge that benefits parameter training. Specifically, we focus on tuples containing the target item and latest relational items that have relations such as complement or substitute with the target item in user’s behavior sequence. Such close relations mean the matching degrees between relational items and historical items should be highly affected by that of the target item and historical items. For example, given a relational item having relation complement with the target item, if the target item has high matching degrees with some items in user’s behavior sequence, this complementary item should behave similarly for the co-occurrence of complementary items. Under guidance of the above thought, in this work, we propose a target-relation regulated mechanism which converts the biased knowledge of high correlation of matching degrees into a regulation. It integrates the target item and relational items in history as a whole to characterize the matching score between the target item and historical items. Experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model can significantly outperform a set of state-of-the-art models.