Building A Non-Personalized Recommender System by Learning Product and Basket Representation

Abstract

In this paper, we addressed the problem of learning product and basket representation for a non-personalized recommendation system where the baskets do not have a specific owner. The recommendation models tend to exploit as much information as possible along with basket patterns to improve performance. We focus on the representation problem for the baskets without any customer information. Deep learning-based architectures have solved many representation problems such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) so far. While the NLP model takes a bag of words as input, the recommendation models take a basket of products as input. The learning algorithm uses co-occurrence information and therefore exploits the idea that the things that appear in a similar environment share similar meaning. But traditional representation approaches such as one-hot encoding have dimensionality problems when the number of entities increases. On the other hand, neural models can solve this dimensionality curse and transform each entity into a short and dense vector, namely embeddings. We successfully designed unsupervised and supervised architectures to solve the product and basket embeddings for a recommendation engine. Our experiments show that the proposed deep learning architecture showed better performance than baseline approaches in terms of many metrics. We also discussed and addressed many product representation related problems throughout the paper.