Personalized diversification of complementary recommendations with user preference in online grocery

Abstract

Complementary recommendations play an important role in surfacing the relevant items to the customers. In the cross-selling scenario, some customers might present more exploratory shopping behaviors and prefer more diverse complements, while other customers show less exploratory (or more conventional) shopping behaviors and want to have a deep dive of less diverse types of complements. The existence of two distinct shopping behaviors reflects users' different shopping intents and requires complementary recommendations to be adaptable based on the user's shopping intent. Although many studies focus on improving the recommendations through post-processing techniques, such as user-item-level personalized ranking and diversification of recommendations, they fail to address such a requirement. First, many user-item-level personalization methods cannot explicitly model the preference of users in two types of shopping behaviors and their intent on the corresponding complementary recommendations. Second, most of the diversification methods increase the heterogeneity of the recommendations. However, users' intent on conventional complementary shopping requires more homogeneity of the recommendations, which is not explicitly modeled. The present study tries attempts to solve these problems by the personalized diversification strategies for complementary recommendations. To address the requirement of modeling heterogenized and homogenized complementary recommendations, we propose two diversification strategies, heterogenization and homogenization, to re-rank complementary recommendations based on the determinantal point process (DPP). We use transaction history to estimate users' intent on more exploratory or more conventional complementary shopping. With the estimated user intent scores and two diversification strategies, we propose an algorithm to personalize the diversification strategies dynamically. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our re-ranking algorithm on the publicly available Instacart dataset.

Keywords: complementary recommendation; diversification; personalization; re-ranking; recommender system (RS).