Search behavior prediction: A hypergraph perspective

At E-Commerce stores such as Amazon, eBay, and Taobao, the shopping items and the query words that customers use to search for the items form a bipartite graph that captures search behavior. Such a query-item graph can be used to forecast search trends or improve search results. For example, generating query-item associations, which is equivalent to predicting links in the bipartite graph, can yield recommendations that can customize and improve the user search experience. Although the bipartite shopping graphs are straightforward to model search behavior, they suffer from two challenges: 1) The majority of items are sporadically searched and hence have noisy/sparse query associations, leading to a long-tail distribution. 2) Infrequent queries are more likely to link to popular items, leading to another hurdle known as disassortative mixing. To address these two challenges, we go beyond the bipartite graph to take a hypergraph perspective, introducing a new paradigm that leverages auxiliary information from anonymized customer engagement sessions to assist the main task of query-item link prediction. This auxiliary information is available at web scale in the form of search logs. We treat all items appearing in the same customer session as a single hyperedge. The hypothesis is that items in a customer session are unified by a common shopping interest. With these hyperedges, we augment the original bipartite graph into a new hypergraph. We develop a Dual-Channel Attention-Based Hypergraph Neural Network (DCAH), which synergizes information from two potentially noisy sources (original query-item edges and item-item hyperedges). In this way, items on the tail are better connected due to the extra hyperedges, thereby enhancing their link prediction performance. We further integrate DCAH with self-supervised graph pre-training and/or DropEdge training, both of which effectively alleviate disassortative mixing. Extensive experiments on three proprietary E-Commerce datasets show that DCAH yields significant improvements of up to 24.6% in mean reciprocal rank (MRR) and 48.3% in recall compared to GNN-based baselines. Our source code is available at https://github.com/amazonscience/dual-channel-hypergraph-neural-network.