Next Basket Recommendation with Neural Networks

One crucial task in recommendation is to predict what a user will buy next given her shopping history. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network to complete this task. The model consists of an embedding layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. Firstly, the distributed representations of the user and the items bought before are obtained and used to form a feature vector by the embedding layer. Then the hidden layer transforms the feature vector to another space by a non-linear operator. Finally, the softmax operator is adopted to output the probabilities of next items. We can see that the model elegantly involves both the user’s general interest and the sequential dependencies between items for prediction. Experimental results on two real datasets prove the effectiveness of our model.