RecNet: A Resource-Constraint Aware Neural Network for Used Car Recommendation

Resource constraints, e.g., limited product inventory or financial strength, may affect consumers’ choices or preferences in some recommendation tasks but are usually ignored in previous recommendation methods. In this paper, we aim to mine the cue of user preferences or intention in the case of resource-constraint recommendation tasks. For this purpose, we specifically build a largely used car transaction dataset possessing resource-constraint characteristics. Accordingly, we propose a resource-constraint-aware network to predict the user’s future interaction based on dynamic connections between users and items. To describe the user-item connection dynamically, mutually recursive recurrent neural networks (MRRNNs) are introduced to capture long-term interactive dependencies, and effective representations of users and items are obtained. To further consider the resource constraint, a resource-constraint branch is built to explore resource variation’s influence on user preferences. Finally, mutual information is introduced to measure the similarity between the future user action and fused historical behavior features to predict future interaction. The fused features come from both MRRNNs and resource-constraint branches. We test the performance on the built used car transaction dataset and the Tmall dataset, and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of our framework.