Website Recommendation with Side Information Aided Variational Autoencoder

Recommender systems had been proposed to help people to find the interested items, such as recommending products to a buyer; identifying movies or music that a user will find interest, etc. However, the existing recommendation approaches mainly focus on capturing user-item interaction patterns for prediction, and ignore the user’s side information such as visit frequency and duration. In this paper, we study the side information aided website recommendation problem that using the browsing history of a set of users and their side information to predict the websites that will be of interest to a certain user. We propose a novel recommendation approach called SI-VAE that incorporates side information with the variational autoencoders (VAEs) model for top-k recommendation. The proposed method takes both user-website interaction information and side information as input, and adopts an encoder/decoder model to generate user’s interested websites from partial observations. The model of SI-VAE is implemented as a neural network, and trained with a multinomial likelihood objective function to form the ranking of user-website interaction probabilities. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, which show that the proposed model outperforms the baselines in a number of performance metrics in website recommendation.