Sequential/Session-based Recommendations: Challenges, Approaches, Applications and Opportunities
It tackles the problem of fragmented research in sequential and session-based recommendations for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing work rather than introducing new methods.
This paper addresses inconsistencies and gaps in the study of sequential and session-based recommender systems by providing a unified framework, comprehensive analysis of data characteristics, challenges, approaches, applications, and future directions to facilitate further research.
In recent years, sequential recommender systems (SRSs) and session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) have emerged as a new paradigm of RSs to capture users' short-term but dynamic preferences for enabling more timely and accurate recommendations. Although SRSs and SBRSs have been extensively studied, there are many inconsistencies in this area caused by the diverse descriptions, settings, assumptions and application domains. There is no work to provide a unified framework and problem statement to remove the commonly existing and various inconsistencies in the area of SR/SBR. There is a lack of work to provide a comprehensive and systematic demonstration of the data characteristics, key challenges, most representative and state-of-the-art approaches, typical real-world applications and important future research directions in the area. This work aims to fill in these gaps so as to facilitate further research in this exciting and vibrant area.