PACIFIC: Enhancing Sequential Recommendation via Preference-aware Causal Intervention and Counterfactual Data Augmentation

Sequential recommendation has been receiving increasing attention from researchers. Existing sequential recommendation models leverage deep learning models to capture sequential features. However, these methods ignore confounders in the recommendation process, which can lead the model to learn incorrect correlations and fail to accurately capture users' true preferences. Moreover, these methods rely on extensive interaction sequences, but sequential data often suffers from sparsity issues. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a <u> P </u>reference-<u> a </u>ware <u> C </u>ausal <u> I </u>ntervention and Counter<u> f </u>a<u> c </u>tual Data Augmentation ( Pacific ) framework to enhance sequential recommendation. Initially, we model the causal graph of sequential recommendation and categorize user preferences into global long-term preferences, local long-term preferences, and short-term preferences. Then, we introduce the front-door criterion to eliminate the interference of confounders and design different self-attention mechanisms to estimate the causal effects, aiming to capture users' true preferences. In addition, based on counterfactual thinking, we design a counterfactual data augmentation module to generate enriched sequences. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods.