Next basket recommendation (NBR) is the task of predicting the next set of
items based on a sequence of already purchased baskets. It is a recommendation
task that has been widely studied, especially in the context of grocery
shopping. In next basket recommendation (NBR), it is useful to distinguish
between repeat items, i.e., items that a user has consumed before, and explore
items, i.e., items that a user has not consumed before. Most NBR work either
ignores this distinction or focuses on repeat items. We formulate the next
novel basket recommendation (NNBR) task, i.e., the task of recommending a
basket that only consists of novel items, which is valuable for both real-world
application and NBR evaluation. We evaluate how existing NBR methods perform on
the NNBR task and find that, so far, limited progress has been made w.r.t. the
NNBR task. To address the NNBR task, we propose a simple bi-directional
transformer basket recommendation model (BTBR), which is focused on directly
modeling item-to-item correlations within and across baskets instead of
learning complex basket representations. To properly train BTBR, we propose and
investigate several masking strategies and training objectives: (i) item-level
random masking, (ii) item-level select masking, (iii) basket-level all masking,
(iv) basket-level explore masking, and (v) joint masking. In addition, an
item-basket swapping strategy is proposed to enrich the item interactions
within the same baskets. We conduct extensive experiments on three open
datasets with various characteristics. The results demonstrate the
effectiveness of BTBR and our masking and swapping strategies for the NNBR
task. BTBR with a properly selected masking and swapping strategy can
substantially improve NNBR performance.

下一个篮子推荐 (NBR) 是基于一系列已经购买的篮子预测下一个物品集的任务，我们提出了一种基于双向 Transformer 篮子推荐模型 (BTBR) 的简单方法，该方法专注于直接建模篮子内部和篮子间的物品之间的关联性，以提高推荐任务的性能。