Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Recommendation

ABSTRACTRecent advances in path-based explainable recommendation systems have attracted increasing attention thanks to the rich information provided by knowledge graphs. Most existing explainable recommendation only utilizes static knowledge graph and ignores the dynamic user-item evolutions, leading to less convincing and inaccurate explanations. Although there are some works that realize that modelling user's temporal sequential behaviour could boost the performance and explainability of the recommender systems, most of them either only focus on modelling user's sequential interactions within a path or independently and separately of the recommendation mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Recommendation (TMER), which utilizes well-designed item-item path modelling between consecutive items with attention mechanisms to sequentially model dynamic user-item evolutions on dynamic knowledge graph for explainable recommendations. Compared with existing works that use heavy recurrent neural networks to model temporal information, we propose simple but effective neural networks to capture users' historical item features and path-based context to characterise next purchased item. Extensive evaluations of TMER on three real-world benchmark datasets show state-of-the-art performance compared against recent strong baselines.