Hierarchical User Profiling for E-commerce Recommender Systems

Hierarchical user profiling that aims to model users' real-time interests in different granularity is an essential issue for personalized recommendations in E-commerce. On one hand, items (i.e. products) are usually organized hierarchically in categories, and correspondingly users' interests are naturally hierarchical on different granularity of items and categories. On the other hand, multiple granularity oriented recommendations become very popular in E-commerce sites, which require hierarchical user profiling in different granularity as well. In this paper, we propose HUP, a Hierarchical User Profiling framework to solve the hierarchical user profiling problem in E-commerce recommender systems. In HUP, we provide a Pyramid Recurrent Neural Networks, equipped with Behavior-LSTM to formulate users' hierarchical real-time interests at multiple scales. Furthermore, instead of simply utilizing users' item-level behaviors (e.g., ratings or clicks) in conventional methods, HUP harvests the sequential information of users' temporal finely-granular interactions (micro-behaviors, e.g., clicks on components of items like pictures or comments, browses with navigation of the search engines or recommendations) for modeling. Extensive experiments on two real-world E-commerce datasets demonstrate the significant performance gains of the HUP against state-of-the-art methods for the hierarchical user profiling and recommendation problems.