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Time to Shop for Valentine's Day: Shopping Occasions and Sequential Recommendation in E-commerce

Currently, most sequence-based recommendation models aim to predict a user's next actions (e.g. next purchase) based on their past actions. These models either capture users' intrinsic preference (e.g. a comedy lover, or a fan of fantasy) from their long-term behavior patterns or infer their current needs by emphasizing recent actions. However, in e-commerce, intrinsic user behavior may be shifted by occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, or gifting celebrations (Valentine's Day or Mother's Day), leading to purchases that deviate from long-term preferences and are not related to recent actions. In this work, we propose a novel next-item recommendation system which models a user's default, intrinsic preference, as well as two different kinds of occasion-based signals that may cause users to deviate from their normal behavior. More specifically, this model is novel in that it: (1) captures a personal occasion signal using an attention layer that models reoccurring occasions specific to that user (e.g. a birthday); (2) captures a global occasion signal using an attention layer that models seasonal or reoccurring occasions for many users (e.g. Christmas); (3) balances the user's intrinsic preferences with the personal and global occasion signals for different users at different timestamps with a gating layer. We explore two real-world e-commerce datasets (Amazon and Etsy) and show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by 7.62% and 6.06% in predicting users' next purchase.