Sequence-Aware Graph Neural Network Incorporating Neighborhood Information for Session-Based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation is an important part of many e-commerce websites. Its purpose is to make recommendations based on the interaction behavior of anonymous users in a short period of time. Graph neural network can capture complex interactions in sessions, and they are a class of methods with better performance among existing session-based recommendation models. However, most existing models only learn item features for a single session. At the same time, GNNs are not good at capturing long-distance dependencies in a session, which leads to limited performance improvements for them. To address this deficiency, we propose sequence-aware graph neural network incorporating neighborhood information, named SAN-GNN. We construct a session graph and a neighborhood graph to learn item representations. For neighborhood graph, we propose a neighborhood Information extractor for the neighborhood graph to learn the neighbor information of nodes on the neighborhood graph. For the graph model of the session layer, we propose a session graph attention(SGA) module to learn the item representation of the target session. SGA uses Ta-LSTM to learn sequential dependencies in the target session and uses GCN with an integrated attention mechanism to learn node feature relevant to the target item. Exhaustive experiments on three public real-world datasets show that SAN-GNN outperforms the most advanced existing session-based method.