A New Sequential Prediction Framework with Spatial-temporal Embedding

Abstract

Sequential prediction is one of the key components in recommendation. In online e-commerce recommendation system, user behavior consists of the sequential visiting logs and item behavior contains the interacted user list in order. Most of the existing state-of-the-art sequential prediction methods only consider the user behavior while ignoring the item behavior. In addition, we find that user behavior varies greatly at different time, and most existing models fail to characterize the rich temporal information. To address the above problems, we propose a transformer-based spatial-temporal recommendation framework (STEM). In the STEM framework, we first utilize attention mechanisms to model user behavior and item behavior, and then exploit spatial and temporal information through a transformer-based model. The STEM framework, as a plug-in, is able to be incorporated into many neural network-based sequential recommendation methods to improve performance. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world Amazon datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.