Towards robust data augmentation for sequence recommendation

This paper presents RAS-Rec, a novel and robust approach to sequence recommendation that leverages the power of data augmentation techniques. RAS-Rec proposes data augmentation as a means to enhance the representations of users and items in sequence recommendation. By generating synthetic training samples through various transformations applied to the original data, RAS-Rec increases the diversity and quantity of the training set. The augmented sequence data addresses the limitations of existing methods and improves the robustness and generalization capabilities of sequence recommendation models. Additionally, a contrastive learning scheme is designed to train and further enhance the representations in RAS-Rec. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods in terms of recommendation performance. The results highlight the value of data augmentation and contrastive learning in sequence recommendation tasks. The findings of this study contribute to the advancement of robust sequence recommendation techniques.