Context-Aware Sequential Recommendations with Stacked Recurrent Neural Networks

Sequential history of user interactions as well as the context of interactions provide valuable information to recommender systems, for modeling user behavior. Modeling both contexts and sequential information simultaneously, in context-aware sequential recommenders, has been shown to outperform methods that model either one of the two aspects. In long sequential histories, temporal trends are also found within sequences of contexts and temporal gaps that are not modeled by previous methods. In this paper we design new context-aware sequential recommendation methods, based on Stacked Recurrent Neural Networks, that model the dynamics of contexts and temporal gaps. Experiments on two large benchmark datasets demonstrate the advantages of modeling the evolution of contexts and temporal gaps - our models significantly outperform state-of-the-art context-aware sequential recommender systems.