Unclicked User Behaviors Enhanced SequentialRecommendation

Deep learning-based sequential recommender systems have recently attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry. Among them, how to comprehensively capture sequential user interest is a fundamental problem. However, most existing sequential recommendation models take as input clicked or purchased behavior sequences from user-item interactions. This leads to incomprehensive user representation and sub-optimal model performance, since they ignore the complete user behavior exposure data, i.e., impressed yet unclicked items. In this work, we attempt to incorporate and model those unclicked item sequences using a new learning approach in order to explore better sequential recommendation technique. An efficient triplet metric learning algorithm is proposed to appropriately learn the representation of unclicked items. Our method can be simply integrated with existing sequential recommendation models by a confidence fusion network and further gain better user representation. We name our algorithm SRU2B (short for Sequential Recommendation with Unclicked User Behaviors). The experimental results based on real-world E-commerce data demonstrate the effectiveness of SRU2B and verify the importance of unclicked items in sequential recommendation.