An essential characteristic in many e-commerce settings is that website visitors can have very specific short-term shopping goals when they browse the site. Relying solely on longterm user models that are pre-trained on historical data can therefore be insufficient for a suitable next-basket recommendation. Simple "real-time" recommendation approaches based, e.g., on unpersonalized co-occurrence patterns, on the other hand do not fully exploit the available information about the user's long-term preference profile.In this work, we aim to explore and quantify the effectiveness of using and combining long-term models and shortterm adaptation strategies. We conducted an empirical evaluation based on a novel evaluation design and two real-world datasets. The results indicate that maintaining short-term content-based and recency-based profiles of the visitors can lead to significant accuracy increases. At the same time, the experiments show that the choice of the algorithm for learning the long-term preferences is particularly important at the beginning of new shopping sessions.
Abstract. In academic studies, the evaluation of recommender system (RS) algorithms is often limited to offline experimental designs based on historical data sets and metrics from the fields of Machine Learning or Information Retrieval. In real-world settings, however, other businessoriented metrics such as click-through-rates, customer retention or effects on the sales spectrum might be the true evaluation criteria for RS effectiveness. In this paper, we compare different RS algorithms with respect to their tendency of focusing on certain parts of the product spectrum. Our first analysis on different data sets shows that some algorithmswhile able to generate highly accurate predictions -concentrate their top 10 recommendations on a very small fraction of the product catalog or have a strong bias to recommending only relatively popular items than others. We see our work as a further step toward multiple-metric offline evaluation and to help service providers make better-informed decisions when looking for a recommendation strategy that is in line with the overall goals of the recommendation service.
In many application domains of recommender systems, explicit rating information is sparse or non-existent. The preferences of the current user have therefore to be approximated by interpreting his or her behavior, i.e., the implicit user feedback. In the literature, a number of algorithm proposals have been made that rely solely on such implicit feedback, among them Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR).In the BPR approach, pairwise comparisons between the items are made in the training phase and an item i is considered to be preferred over item j if the user interacted in some form with i but not with j. In real-world applications, however, implicit feedback is not necessarily limited to such binary decisions as there are, e.g., different types of user actions like item views, cart or purchase actions and there can exist several actions for an item over time.In this paper we show how BPR can be extended to deal with such more fine-granular, graded preference relations. An empirical analysis shows that this extension can help to measurably increase the predictive accuracy of BPR on realistic e-commerce datasets.
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