Multiple Purchase Chains with Negative Transfer Elimination for Multi-Behavior Recommendation

Multi-behavior recommendation exploits auxiliary behaviors (e.g., view, cart) to help predict users' potential target behavior (e.g., purchase) on a given item. However, existing works suffer from two issues: (1) They generally consider only a single chain from auxiliary behaviors to the target behavior, referred to as a purchase chain (e.g., view -> cart -> purchase), ignoring other valuable purchase chains (e.g., view ->purchase) that are beneficial for recommendation performance. (2) Most studies presume that interacted items in auxiliary behaviors are good for recommendations, and pay little attention to the negative transfer problem. That is, some auxiliary behaviors may negatively transfer the influence to the modeling of target ones (e.g., items viewed but not purchased). To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel Multiple Purchase Chains (MPC) model with negative transfer elimination for multi-behavior recommendation. Specifically, we construct multiple purchase chains from auxiliary to target behaviors according to users' historical interactions, while the representations of a previous behavior will be fed to initialize the next behavior on the chain. Then, we construct a negative graph for the latter behavior and learn the negative representations of users and items which will be filtered out to eliminate negative transfer. Experimental results on two real datasets outperform the best baseline by 40.97% and 47.26% on average in terms of Recall@10 and NDCG@10 respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.