RNN-based sequence prediction as an alternative or complement to traditional recommender systems

Sammanfattning: The recurrent neural networks have the ability to grasp the temporal patterns withinthe data. This is a property that can be used in order to help a recommender system bettertaking into account the user past history. Still the dimensionality problem that raiseswithin the recommender system field also raises here as the number of items the systemhave to be aware of is susceptibility high. Recent research have studied the use of such neural networks at a user’s session level.This thesis rather examines the use of this technique at a whole user’s past history levelassociated with techniques such as embeddings and softmax sampling in order to accommodatewith the high dimensionality. The proposed method results in a sequence prediction model that can be used as is forthe recommender task or as a feature within a more complex system.