Sequential Heterogeneous Attribute Embedding for Item Recommendation

Attributes, such as metadata and profile, carry useful information which in principle can help improve accuracy in recommender systems. However, existing approaches have difficulty in fully leveraging attribute information due to practical challenges such as heterogeneity and sparseness. These approaches also fail to combine recurrent neural networks which have recently shown effectiveness in item recommendations in applications such as video and music browsing. To overcome the challenges and to harvest the advantages of sequence models, we present a novel approach, Heterogeneous Attribute Recurrent Neural Networks (HA-RNN), which incorporates heterogeneous attributes and captures sequential dependencies in both items and attributes. HA-RNN extends recurrent neural networks with 1) a hierarchical attribute combination input layer and 2) an output attribute embedding layer. Experiments on two large-scale datasets show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art models. Ablation experiments demonstrate the crucialness of the two components to address heterogeneous attribute challenges including variable lengths and attribute sparseness. Furthermore, our exploratory studies also shed light on why sequence modeling works well.