A Graph-based Method for Session-based Recommendations

We present a graph-based approach for the data management tasks and the efficient operation of a system for session-based next-item recommendations. The proposed method can collect data continuously and incrementally from an ecommerce web site, thus seemingly prepare the necessary data infrastructure for the recommendation algorithm to operate without any excessive training phase. Our work aims at developing a recommender method that represents a balance between data processing and management efficiency requirements and the effectiveness of the recommendations produced. We use the Neo4j graph database to implement a prototype of such a system. Furthermore, we use an industry dataset corresponding to a typical e-commerce session-based scenario, and we report on experiments using our graph-based approach and other state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning methods.