Translation-based Recommendation: A Scalable Method for Modeling Sequential Behavior

Modeling the complex interactions between users and items is at the core of designing successful recommender systems. One key task consists of predicting users’ personalized sequential behavior, where the challenge mainly lies in modeling ‘third-order’ interactions between a user, her previously visited item(s), and the next item to consume. In this paper, we propose a unified method, TransRec, to model such interactions for largescale sequential prediction. Methodologically, we embed items into a ‘transition space’ where users are modeled as translation vectors operating on item sequences. Empirically, this approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on a wide spectrum of real-world datasets.

Authors

• Ruining He
• Wang-Cheng Kang
• Julian McAuley UCSD

Keywords

• Humans and AI: Personalization and User Modeling
• Machine Learning: Recommender Systems