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Data Augmented Sequential Recommendation Based on Counterfactual Thinking

delete2023-09-01
delete6
PRE
AI
X
Xu Chen
Z
Zhenlei Wang
H
Hongteng Xu
J
Jingsen Zhang
Y
Yongfeng Zhang
赵鑫 (Wayne Xin Zhao) *
J
Ji-Rong Wen
DOI:10.1109/TKDE.2022.3222070delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Sequential recommendation has recently attracted increasing attention from the industry and academic communities. While previous models have achieved remarkable successes, an important problem may still hinder their performances, that is, the sparsity of the real-world data. In this paper, we propose a novel counterfactual data augmentation framework to alleviate the problem of data sparsity. In specific, our framework contains a sampler model and an anchor model. The sampler model aims to generate high-quality user behavior sequences, while the anchor model is trained based on the original and new generated samples, and leveraged to provide the final recommendation list. To implement the sampler model, we first design four types of heuristic methods based on either random or frequency-based strategies. And then, to improve the quality of the generated sequences, we propose two learning-based samplers by discovering the decision boundaries or increasing the sample informativeness. At last, we build an RL based model to automatically determine where to edit the history behaviors and how many items should be replaced. Considering that the sampler model can be imperfect, we, at last, analyze the influence of the noisy information contained in the generated sequences on the anchor model in theory, and design a simple but effective method to better serve the anchor model. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
Keywords:
Sequential recommendation
collaborative filtering
counterfactual
causal inference

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering cover
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
IF:
10.4
Papers:
6.7K
Citations:
3.2W

Organization

R
Renmin University of China
Scholars:
8.1K
Papers: 7.7K
Citations: 1.1W
R
rutgers university system
Scholars:
4.1W
Papers: 3.7W
Citations: 53