Flexible Order Aware Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Sequential recommendations can dynamically model user interests, which has great value since users' interests may change rapidly with time. Traditional sequential recommendation methods assume that the user behaviors are rigidly ordered and sequentially dependent. However, some user behaviors have flexible orders, meaning the behaviors may occur in any order and are not sequentially dependent. Therefore, traditional methods may capture inaccurate user interests based on wrong dependencies. Motivated by this, several methods identify flexible orders by continuity or similarity. However, these methods fail to comprehensively understand the nature of flexible orders since continuity or similarity do not determine order flexibilities. Therefore, these methods may misidentify flexible orders, leading to inappropriate recommendations. To address these issues, we propose a Flexible Order aware Sequential Recommendation (FOSR) method to identify flexible orders comprehensively. We argue that orders' flexibilities are highly related to the frequencies of item pair co-occurrences. In light of this, FOSR employs a probabilistic based flexible order evaluation module to simulate item pair frequencies and infer accurate order flexibilities. The frequency labeling module extracts labels from the real item pair frequencies to guide the order flexibility measurement. Given the measured order flexibilities, we develop a flexible order aware self-attention module to model dependencies from flexible orders comprehensively and learn dynamic user interests effectively. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods.