GTPAN: Global Target Preference Attention Network for session-based recommendation

Session-based recommendations (SBR) aim to predict the user's next choice of items based on historical data. It is hard to access the interaction information between users and we can only analyze the user's behavioral preferences based on the current session characteristics, which makes the recommendation task in this field quite challenging. Recently, considerable research has grown up around the theme of SBR. Previous works apply attention mechanisms and Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to achieve remarkable results. However, these methods ignore two main points: one is losing sight of the specific position of items in the session; the other is to drive global preference with local preference without considering the offset of the target preference among items in the session. This paper proposes a Global Target Preference Attention Network (GTPAN) Model with position information for the session-based recommendation. We introduce a position-aware embedding module to eliminate the effect of position missing. Considering that each item in the session is potentially rich in latent information of target preference, we use a target preference attention layer to learn the target preference vector of the session. Extensive experiments on three real datasets show that the proposed GTPAN model outperforms state-of-the-art session-based recommendation methods, especially on datasets with long sessions.