Recommender systems are a long-standing research problem in data mining and machine learning. They are incremental in nature, as new user-item interaction logs arrive. In real-world applications, we need to periodically train a collaborative filtering algorithm to extract user/item embedding vectors and therefore, a time-series of embedding vectors can be naturally defined. We present a time-series forecasting-based upgrade kit (TimeKit), which works in the following way: it i) first decides a base collaborative filtering algorithm, ii) extracts user/item embedding vectors with the base algorithm from user-item interaction logs incrementally, e.g., every month, iii) trains our time-series forecasting model with the extracted time- series of embedding vectors, and then iv) forecasts the future embedding vectors and recommend with their dot-product scores owing to a recent breakthrough in processing complicated time- series data, i.e., neural controlled differential equations (NCDEs). Our experiments with four real-world benchmark datasets show that the proposed time-series forecasting-based upgrade kit can significantly enhance existing popular collaborative filtering algorithms.

受微分方程式启发的深度学习是最近的研究趋势，它标志着许多机器学习任务的最先进的表现。其中，具有神经控制的微分方程（NCDE）的时间序列建模被认为是突破。在许多情况下，基于NCDE的模型不仅比复发性神经网络（RNN）提供了更好的准确性，而且还可以处理不规则的时间序列。在这项工作中，我们通过重新设计其核心部分，即从离散的时间序列输入产生连续路径来增强NCDES。 NCDE通常使用插值算法将离散的时间序列样本转换为连续路径。但是，我们向i）提出建议，使用编码器解码器体系结构生成另一个潜在的连续路径，该架构对应于NCDE的插值过程，即我们的基于神经网络的插值与现有的显式插值相对于现有的显式插值以及II）解码器的外推超出了原始数据的时域的外推。因此，我们的NCDE设计可以同时使用插值和外推信息进行下游机器学习任务。在我们使用5个现实世界数据集和12个基线的实验中，我们的外推和基于插值的NCDES超过了非平凡的边缘的现有基线。