Provide a Personalized Session-Based Recommender System with Self-Attention Networks

Session-based recommender systems predict the next behavior or interest of the user based on user behavior and interactions in a session, and suggest appropriate items to the user accordingly. Recent studies to make recommendations have focused mainly on the information of the current session and ignore the information of the user's previous sessions. In this paper, a personalized session-based recommender model with self-attention networks is proposed, which uses the user's previous recent sessions in addition to the current session. The proposed model uses self-attention networks (SANs) to learn the global dependencies among all session items. First, SAN is trained based on anonymous sessions. Then for each user, the sequences of the current session and previous sessions are given to the network separately, and by weighted combining the ranking results from each session, the final recommended items are obtained. The proposed model is tested and evaluated on real-world Reddit dataset in two criteria of accuracy and mean reciprocal rank. Comparing the results of the proposed model with previous approaches indicates the ability and effectiveness of the proposed model in providing more accurate recommendations.