Recurrent Recommender Networks

Abstract

Recommender systems traditionally assume that user profiles and movie attributes are static. Temporal dynamics are purely reactive, that is, they are inferred after they are observed, e.g. after a user's taste has changed or based on hand-engineered temporal bias corrections for movies. We propose Recurrent Recommender Networks (RRN) that are able to predict future behavioral trajectories. This is achieved by endowing both users and movies with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) autoregressive model that captures dynamics, in addition to a more traditional low-rank factorization. On multiple real-world datasets, our model offers excellent prediction accuracy and it is very compact, since we need not learn latent state but rather just the state transition function.