FlowRec: Prototyping Session-Based Recommender Systems in Streaming Mode

Abstract

Despite the increasing interest towards session-based and streaming recommender systems, there is still a lack of publicly available evaluation frameworks supporting both these paradigms. To address the gap, we propose FlowRec — an extension of the streaming framework Scikit-Multiflow, which opens plentiful possibilities for prototyping recommender systems operating on sessionized data streams, thanks to the underlying collection of incremental learners and support for real-time performance tracking. We describe the extended functionalities of the adapted prequential evaluation protocol, and develop a competitive recommendation algorithm on top of Scikit-Multiflow’s implementation of a Hoeffding Tree. We compare our algorithm to other known baselines for the next-item prediction task across three different domains.