Flow-based Time-aware Causal Structure Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Sequential models aim to predict future interactions based on users' historical interaction sequences. Traditional sequential methods primarily focus on capturing intra-historical sequence dependencies, overlooking the influence of unobserved confounders in recommendation scenarios. Recent studies incorporate time as additional information helps the model capture dynamic user preferences. However, time is just the external manifestation of the influence of confounders but not the actual cause of the dynamic of user preference. Additionally, improperly integrating time with item embeddings can obstruct the model's ability to capture sequence dependencies. To address these challenges, we first revisit the sequential recommendation problem from a causal perspective and incorporate confounders as a new task. We propose a new framework—Flow-based Time-aware Causal Structure for Sequential Recommendation (FCSRec)—explicitly incorporating unobserved confounders' influence in the recommendation process. Specifically, we use Normalizing Flows to learn the causal graph of confounders and incorporate time information as conditional info to capture confounders' time-sensitive representations. To balance the influence of confounders and sequence dependencies, we introduce a classifier-free training paradigm by randomly masking the influence of confounders during training to encourage the model to learn both sequence dependencies and confounders' influence equally. We validate FCSRec on manifold real-world datasets, and experimental results show that FCSRec outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in recommendation performance. Our code is available at Code-link.