G-STO: Sequential main shopping intention detection via graph-regularized stochastic transformer

Sequential recommendation requires understanding the dynamic patterns of users’ behaviors, contexts, and preferences from their historical interactions. While most research emphasizes item-level user-item interactions, they often overlook underlying shopping intentions, such as preferences for ballpoint pens or miniatures. Identifying these latent intentions is vital for enhancing shopping experiences on platforms like Amazon. Despite its significance, the area of main shopping intention detection remains under-investigated in the academic literature. To fill this gap, we introduce a graphregularized stochastic Transformer approach, G-STO. It considers intentions as product sets and user preferences as intention composites, both modeled as stochastic Gaussian embeddings in latent space. We also employ a global intention relational graph as prior knowledge for regularization, ensuring related intentions are distributionally close. These regularized embeddings are then input into Transformer-based models to capture sequential intention transitions. On testing our model with three real-world datasets, it outperformed the baselines by 18.08% in Hit@1, 7.01% in Hit@10, and 6.11% in NDCG@10.