Enhancing sequential recommendation with contrastive Generative Adversarial Network

Sequential recommendation models a user's historical sequence to predict future items. Existing studies utilize deep learning methods and contrastive learning for data augmentation to alleviate data sparsity. However, these existing methods cannot learn accurate high-quality item representations while augmenting data. In addition, they usually ignore data noise and user cold-start issues. To solve the above issues, we investigate the possibility of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with contrastive learning for sequential recommendation to balance data sparsity and noise. Specifically, we propose a new framework, Enhanced Contrastive Learning with Generative Adversarial Network for Sequential Recommendation (ECGAN-Rec), which models the training process as a GAN and recommendation task as the main task of the discriminator. We design a sequence augmentation module and a contrastive GAN module to implement both data-level and model-level augmentations. In addition, the contrastive GAN learns more accurate high-quality item representations to alleviate data noise after data augmentation. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced Transformer recommender based on GAN to optimize the performance of the model. Experimental results on three open datasets validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model and the ability of the model to balance data noise and data sparsity. Specifically, the improvement of ECGAN-Rec in two evaluation metrics (HR@N and NDCG@N) compared to the state-of-the-art model performance on the Beauty, Sports and Yelp datasets are 34.95%, 36.68%, and 13.66%, respectively. Our implemented model is available via https://github.com/nishawn/ECGANRec-master.