Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: A transparent decision-making process is essential for developing reliable and trustworthy recommender systems. For sequential recommendation, it means that the model can identify key items that account for its recommendation results. However, achieving both interpretability and recommendation performance simultaneously is challenging, especially for models that take the entire sequence of items as input without screening. In this paper, we propose an interpretable framework (named PTSR) that enables a pattern-wise transparent decision-making process without extra features. It breaks the sequence of items into multi-level patterns that serve as atomic units throughout the recommendation process. The contribution of each pattern to the outcome is quantified in the probability space. With a carefully designed score correction mechanism, the pattern contribution can be implicitly learned in the absence of ground-truth key patterns. The final recommended items are those that most key patterns strongly endorse. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate remarkable recommendation performance, while statistical analysis and case studies validate the model interpretability.
Authors: Kun Ma, Cong Xu, Zeyuan Chen, Wei Zhang
Institutions: East China Normal University, Ant Group (China)
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G1314841804, 基于混合表征学习的用户评论个性化建模研究
OpenAlex ID: W4408241949