Impression-informed multi-behavior recommender system: A hierarchical graph attention approach

While recommender systems have significantly benefited from implicit feedback, they have often missed the nuances of multi-behavior interactions between users and items. Historically, these systems either amalgamated all behaviors, such as impression (formerly view), add-to-cart, and buy, under a singular ’interaction’ label, or prioritized only the target behavior, often the buy action, discarding valuable auxiliary signals. Although recent advancements tried addressing this simplification, they primarily gravitated towards optimizing the target behavior alone, battling with data scarcity. Additionally, they tended to bypass the nuanced hierarchy intrinsic to behaviors. To bridge these gaps, we introduce the Hierarchical Multi-behavior Graph Attention Network (HMGN). This pioneering framework leverages attention mechanisms to discern information from both inter and intra-behaviors while employing a multi-task Hierarchical Bayesian Personalized Ranking (HBPR) for optimization. Recognizing the need for scalability, our approach integrates a specialized multi-behavior sub-graph sampling technique. Moreover, the adaptability of HMGN allows for the seamless inclusion of knowledge metadata and time-series data. Empirical results attest to our model’s prowess, registering a notable performance boost of up to 64% in NDCG@100 metrics over conventional graph neural network methods.