Time-sensitive recommendation from recurrent user activities

Nan Du, Yichen Wang, Niao He, Le Song

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

By making personalized suggestions, a recommender system is playing a crucial role in improving the engagement of users in modern web-services. However, most recommendation algorithms do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users. Two central but less explored questions are how to recommend the most desirable item at the right moment, and how to predict the next returning time of a user to a service. To address these questions, we propose a novel framework which connects self-exciting point processes and low-rank models to capture the recurrent temporal patterns in a large collection of user-item consumption pairs. We show that the parameters of the model can be estimated via a convex optimization, and furthermore, we develop an efficient algorithm that maintains O(1/σ) convergence rate, scales up to problems with millions of user-item pairs and hundreds of millions of temporal events. Compared to other state-of-the-arts in both synthetic and real datasets, our model achieves superb predictive performance in the two time-sensitive recommendation tasks. Finally, we point out that our formulation can incorporate other extra context information of users, such as profile, textual and spatial features.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3492-3500
Number of pages9
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume2015-January
StatePublished - 2015
Event29th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2015 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: Dec 7 2015Dec 12 2015

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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