Code for our ACM RecSys 2017 paper "Personalizing Session-based Recommendation with Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks". See the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04148

This code is based of GRU4Rec (https://github.com/hidasib/GRU4Rec). As the original code, it is written in Python 3.4 and requires Theano 0.8.0+ to run efficiently on GPU. In addition, this code uses H5Py and PyTables for efficient I/O operations.

We suggest to use virtualenv or conda (preferred) together with requirements.txt to set up a virtual environment before running the code.

This repository comes with the code necessary to reproduce the experiments on the XING dataset. This dataset was released to the participants of the 2016 Recsys Challenge.

1. Download the dataset (see here, though it is no longer available. See format in this comment). You will only need the file interactions.csv.

2. cd data/xing, then run python build_dataset.py <path_to_interactions> to build the dataset. It will be saved under data/xing/dense/last-session-out/sessions.hdf.

3. To run HGRU on this dataset, go to scripts folder. Then run sh xing_dense_small.sh to execute small HRNN networks, or run sh xing_dense_large.sh to execute large HRNN networks. See the paper for further details (notice that we used random seeds in {0..9} in our experiments).

NOTE: These experiments run quite efficiently on CPU too (small networks train and evaluate in ~20 minutes on a 8-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1246 v3 @ 3.50GHz).