Session-based Recommendation Using Recurrent Neural Networks: A
Comparative Theoretical Analysis
Abstract
Recommender Systems(RSs) are widely used for providing suggestions to
users on digital platforms. Recently, there has been a significant
amount of interest in the class of session-based recommender systems
(SBRSs) in the RS research community. In session-based recommendation
scenarios, the task is to provide suggestions to the users subject to
the interactions or data available in an ongoing session. In contrast to
the traditional recommendation approaches (e.g. collaborative or
content-based), which model long-term preferences , the SBRSs attempt to
model the short-term preferences of users. Recurrent Neural Networks
(RNNs) are great tools for modelling sequential data; therefore become
good choices for SBRSs. This work performs a comparative analysis of the
most prominent RNN-based approaches for SBRSs. Firstly, the RNN-based
approaches are classified based on the characteristics of session data
(such as session length, ordering of session data, etc.) that are
exploited in the recommendation process. Secondly, a concise theoretical
investigation of these approaches featuring their pros and cons is
provided. Further, for each of these approaches, a simplified model
architecture illustrating the overall functioning of the approach is
also depicted. Finally, we observe that it is difficult to comprehend
the state-of-the-art for RNN-based SBRS approaches.