A knowledge-enhanced interest segment division attention network for click-through rate prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction aims to estimate the probability of a user clicking on a particular item, making it one of the core tasks in various recommendation platforms. In such systems, user behavior data are crucial for capturing user interests, which has garnered significant attention from both academia and industry, leading to the development of various user behavior modeling methods. However, existing models still face unresolved issues, as they fail to capture the complex diversity of user interests at the semantic level, refine user interests effectively, and uncover users’ potential interests. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model called knowledge-enhanced Interest segment division attention network (KISDAN), which can effectively and comprehensively model user interests. Specifically, to leverage the semantic information within user behavior sequences, we employ the structure of a knowledge graph to divide user behavior sequence into multiple interest segments. To provide a comprehensive representation of user interests, we further categorize user interests into strong and weak interests. By leveraging both the knowledge graph and the item co-occurrence graph, we explore users’ potential interests from two perspectives. This methodology allows KISDAN to better understand the diversity of user interests. Finally, we extensively evaluate KISDAN on three benchmark datasets, and the experimental results consistently demonstrate that the KISDAN model outperforms state-of-the-art models across various evaluation metrics, which validates the effectiveness and superiority of KISDAN.