Beyond Learning from Next Item: Sequential Recommendation via Personalized Interest Sustainability

Abstract: Sequential recommender systems have shown effective suggestions by capturing users' interest drift. There have been two groups of existing sequential models: user- and item-centric models. The user-centric models capture personalized interest drift based on each user's sequential consumption history, but do not explicitly consider whether users' interest in items sustains beyond the training time, i.e., interest sustainability. On the other hand, the item-centric models consider whether users' general interest sustains after the training time, but it is not personalized. In this work, we propose a recommender system taking advantages of the models in both categories. Our proposed model captures personalized interest sustainability, indicating whether each user's interest in items will sustain beyond the training time or not. We first formulate a task that requires to predict which items each user will consume in the recent period of the training time based on users' consumption history. We then propose simple yet effective schemes to augment users' sparse consumption history. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms 10 baseline models on 11 real-world datasets. The codes are available at https://github.com/dmhyun/PERIS.