Sequential Recommendation Model Based on Deep Residual Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract

In order to solve the problem that the sequence recommendation model based on RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) is prone to gradient vanishing or exploding when processing long sequences, which leads to the instability of the recommendation model training process, residual connection, layer normalization and feedforward neural network modules are introduced on the basis of the traditional gated recurrent unit (GRU), and a sequence recommendation model DeepGRU based on deep residual recurrent neural network is proposed. It is verified on 3 public datasets. The experimental results show that the DeepGRU has obvious advantages over the most advanced sequence recommendation methods (the average recommendation accuracy is improved 8.68%). The ablation experiment verifies the effectiveness of the introduced residual connection and other modules under the DeepGRU framework. In addition, the DeepGRU effectively alleviates the problem of unstable training process when processing long sequences.