General instructions

For reproducing our work run the commands described below. If you just want to see final optimal configurations and the scores (reported in the paper), please scroll down to the this section. For the software requirements and the list of python packages see Requirements section (please follow the described steps for setting an environment before proceeding).

Downloading and preparing data

You need to run this command once in order to download and preprocess datasets the same way we did in our paper:

python data/prepare.py

It automatically selects the necessary columns, convert time info into the unified format across all datasets, performs p-core filtering (for Steam) and saves data into compact gz files in the data folder. Note, it may take a long time to process all 4 datasets, approximately 40+ minutes.

Hyper-parameter tuning

To launch a grid-search experiments run:

python tune.py --model=<model name> --dataset=<dataset_name> --time_offset=<valid-test-time> --maxlen=<max-sequence-length> --grid_config=<name-of-config-file> --bypass_wandb

Possible values of arguments (case-insensitive)

• <model name>
  • MP or MostPopular
  • SVD or PureSVD
  • GA-SATF
  • LA-SATF
  • SASRec
• <dataset_name> / <valid-test-time> / <max-sequence-length>
  • ML-1M / "4months-4months" / 200
  • AMZ-B / "3weeks-3weeks" / 50
  • AMZ-G / "6weeks-6weeks" / 50
  • Steam / "1days-2days" / 50
• <name-of-config-file> (files must be stored in the grids folder)
  • gsatf_grid
  • lsatf_grid or lsatf_grid_ml1m
  • sasrec_grid
  • svd_grid
  • svdN_grid

Important note: as the multilinear rank values and the attention window size for the LA-SATF model depend on the dataset, you'll need to adjust the grid configuration file at settings accordingly. By default, the grid configuration provided in lsatf_grid is suitable for all datasets except ML-1M. For the ML-1M dataset, you have to provide the lsatf_grid_ml1m option to the --grid_config= argument.

You can also specify your onw grid-search config files and place them into the grids folder. Or, alternatively, modify the default ones listed above.

If you have wanbd login and want to store results in the cloud, then remove --bypass_wandb switch. You may need to properly initialize your wandb project/entity settings or set sweep_args dictionary in the tune.py module. You can also explicitly specify an existing sweep to report to by passing --sweep=<sweep-id>.

You can additionally pass --grid_steps=n to run over only n random grid points. If this parameter is not set, the program will run until parameter grid is exhausted or execution is interrupted by user.

Once the grid is exhausetd (or user interrupted execution by pressing Ctrl+C), the program will attempt to run final test based on the best found config and report the results. You can also run test separately using any valid configuration as described below.

Manually running tests

If you want to see scores corresponding to a specific configuration, you can run:

python test.py --model=<model name> --dataset=<dataset_name> --time_offset=<valid-test-time> --maxlen=<max-sequence-length> --test_config=<path-to-config-file> --bypass_wandb

Most of the aruments here are the same and should correspond to experiments from the tuning phase. If you have a local config file, then it must be specified via <path-to-config-file>. You can also specify --sweep (don't forget to remove --bypass_wandb), in which case the program will analyze all runs in the specified sweep and take configuration corresponding the highest target metric score (NDCG@10 by default). You can also specify an exact run from the sweep by passing --run_id=<sweeep-run-id>.

Examples

• Running grid search (locally) for LA-SATF model on Amazon Beauty dataset:
  python tune.py --model=LA-SATF --dataset=amz-b --time_offset=3weeks-3weeks --maxlen=50 --grid_config="lsatf_grid" --bypass_wandb
  • if you let the program to exhaust entire grid or if you interrupt its execution at som moment (by hitting Ctrl+C once), it will automatically perform testing on the best found hyper-parameters configuration and report the results.
• Running test (locally) with simple popularity-based model, which does not require any confguration (hence, --test_config argument is omitted):
  python test.py --model=MP --dataset=amz-b --time_offset=3weeks-3weeks --maxlen=50 --bypass_wandb

The reported results and corresponding configurations

Hyper-parameters

		AMZ-B	AMZ-G	ML-1M	Steam
GA-SATF	scaling	0.2	0.4	0	0
	pos_rank	2	20	12	10
	item_rank	600	800	100	400
	user_rank	800	900	300	700
	rescaled	False	False	True	False
	attention_decay	1	0	1.2	0
	num_iters	2	2	6	1
LA-SATF	scaling	0.2	0.2	0.2	0
	item_rank	600	600	200	900
	user_rank	700	500	600	500
	rescaled	False	False	True	False
	attention_decay	0	0	1	1
	num_iters	3	3	4	2
	attention_rank	1	1	20	1
	sequences_rank	2	2	20	2
	attention_window	2	2	40	2
PureSVD	scaling	1	1	1	1
	rank	800	1500	100	100
PureSVD-N	scaling	0.6	0.2	0.0	0.0
	rank	2000	1000	800	1500
	rescaled	False	False	False	False
SASRec	lr	0.0001	0.0001	0.0001	1e-05
	l2_emb	0	0	0	0
	num_heads	1	1	1	1
	batch_size	128	512	128	256
	num_blocks	1	2	2	3
	dropout_rate	0.2	0.2	0.4	0.2
	hidden_units	256	768	256	512
	epoch	100	100	120	80

Final scores

	metric@10	GA-SATF	LA-SATF	MP	PureSVD	PureSVD-N	RND	SASRec
amz-b	COV	0.182	0.608	0.007	0.251	0.615	0.985	0.611
	HR	0.079+-0.004	0.114+-0.005	0.004+-0.001	0.082+-0.004	0.087+-0.004	0.001+-0.000	0.100+-0.004
	NDCG	0.043+-0.002	0.067+-0.003	0.002+-0.000	0.046+-0.002	0.047+-0.002	0.000+-0.000	0.055+-0.003
amz-g	COV	0.241	0.426	0.008	0.467	0.631	0.983	0.700
	HR	0.074+-0.004	0.092+-0.004	0.003+-0.001	0.070+-0.004	0.101+-0.004	0.001+-0.000	0.094+-0.004
	NDCG	0.046+-0.003	0.052+-0.003	0.002+-0.000	0.042+-0.002	0.058+-0.003	0.000+-0.000	0.055+-0.003
ml-1m	COV	0.288	0.511	0.038	0.187	0.275	1.000	0.503
	HR	0.112+-0.004	0.132+-0.004	0.000+-0.000	0.060+-0.003	0.061+-0.003	0.004+-0.001	0.134+-0.004
	NDCG	0.061+-0.002	0.072+-0.003	0.000+-0.000	0.029+-0.002	0.030+-0.002	0.002+-0.000	0.069+-0.002
steam	COV	0.047	0.368	0.018	0.070	0.438	0.997	0.080
	HR	0.013+-0.001	0.091+-0.003	0.000+-0.000	0.039+-0.002	0.084+-0.003	0.001+-0.000	0.115+-0.004
	NDCG	0.007+-0.001	0.047+-0.002	0.000+-0.000	0.020+-0.001	0.043+-0.002	0.001+-0.000	0.060+-0.002

Requirements

mamba

We use mamba package manager (based on conda) with the default conda-forge channel for installing Python packages. The easiest way to get it is to download and install mamba-forge distribution from here.

main python packages

When mamba is installed, you can recreate our einvironment by running:

 mamba env create -f environment.yml

This will create a new environment named satf. The environment.yml file with all the needed dependencies is included in this repository.

extra packages

We use Polara framework for orchestrating some parts of the experiments. You can install it into your enviroment by running:

conda activate satf
pip install --no-cache-dir --upgrade git+https://github.com/evfro/polara.git@develop#egg=polara

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the RSCF Grant 22-21-00911.