User Interest Drift Identification Using Contextual Factors in Implicit Feedback-Based Recommender Systems

Abstract

The modeling of appropriate recommendations using the session interactions in the implicit feedback-based recommender systems necessitates the identification of user interest drift. But this identification is challenging due to the presence of unintentional interactions (noise) made by the user. Most of the existing literature focused on understanding the correlation between ongoing session interactions but did not explore the contextual factors, such as the time of occurrence of the session and the item’s popularity, that led the user to perform that specific interaction. This has resulted in the wrongful categorization of interactions between user interest drift and noise. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a deep learning-based approach that uses both ongoing session information and contextual information. Depending on availability, this work also considers the user’s previous interactions to generate personalized recommendations. In comparison with the existing works, this work effectively identifies the user interest drift and generates the appropriate recommendations for the users. The proposed approach demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Recall and MRR, as evidenced by experimental results on benchmark datasets. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.