An Attention-Based Latent Information Extraction Network (ALIEN) for High-Order Feature Interactions

• Main Authors: Ruo Huang, Shelby McIntyre, Meina Song, Haihong E, Zhonghong Ou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: recommender systems; collaborative filtering; click-through rate prediction; high-order feature interactions; attention mechanism; explainable recommendation
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/16/5468

One of the primary tasks for commercial recommender systems is to predict the probabilities of users clicking items, e.g., advertisements, music and products. This is because such predictions have a decisive impact on profitability. The classic recommendation algorithm, collaborative filtering (CF), still plays a vital role in many industrial recommender systems. However, although straight CF is good at capturing similar users’ preferences for items based on their past interactions, it lacks regarding (1) modeling the influences of users’ sequential patterns from their individual history interaction sequences and (2) the relevance of users’ and items’ attributes. In this work, we developed an attention-based latent information extraction network (ALIEN) for click-through rate prediction, to integrate (1) implicit user similarity in terms of click patterns (analogous to CF), and (2) modeling the low and high-order feature interactions and (3) historical sequence information. The new model is based on the deep learning, which goes beyond the capabilities of econometric approaches, such as matrix factorization (MF) and k-means. In addition, the approach provides explainability to the recommendation by interpreting the contributions of different features and historical interactions. We have conducted experiments on real-world datasets that demonstrate considerable improvements over strong baselines.