Deep Time-Aware Attention Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation

For click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks, a good prediction performance can be obtained by full explorations of both user behavior and item behavior. Since user’s interests have a great influence on user’s behaviors, it is very important to learn users’ intrinsic interests according to their behaviors. User interests are not only diverse but also in dynamic change. However, the dynamics of user interests’ change are not fully taken into account by the majority of current CTR models. The latest sequential recommendation algorithm ignores the subjectivity of users when it uses a two-layer recurrent neural network to model the item behavior from the perspective of the evolution of items. In this work, we propose a recurrent neural network model called DTIAN (Deep Time-Aware Interest Attention Network) to address these issues. By leveraging the user behaviors and the corresponding temporal information, DTIAN captures user interests and intent changes to the target item. Therefore, the users’ recent interests are enhanced compared to early interests with the attention mechanism. In addition, each module of the proposed model can be plugged into other mainstream models to improve the performance of current models. The experimental results show that the proposed DTIAN can outperform the current popular CTR prediction models slightly and significantly reduce the training time, which makes it possible to implement lightweight models.