Improving session based recommendation by diversity awareness

Recommender systems help users to discover and filter new and interesting products based on their preferences. Session-Based Recommender systems are powerful tools for anonymous e-commerce visitors to understand their behaviours and recommend useful products. Diversity in the recommendations is an important parameter due to increasing the opportunity of recommending new and less similar items that users interacted. Effect of diversity has been investigated in many works for the collaborative filtering-based Recommender systems. However, for session-based Recommender systems, exploring the effect of diversity is still an open area. In this paper, we propose an approach to calculate the diversity level of the items in the session logs and analyse the effect of diversity level on the session-based recommendation. In order to test the impact of diversity awareness, we propose a sequential Item-KNN recommendation model. The final recommendation list is created as a contribution of the interacted items in the session that depends on the diversity level between last interacted item of the session. We conduct several experiments to validate our diversity aware model on a real-world dataset. The results show that diversity awareness in the sessions helps to improve the performance of Recommender system in terms of recall and precision evaluation metrics. Also, the proposed method can be applied to other sequential Recommender system methods, including deep-learning based Recommender systems.