DPBD: Disentangling Preferences via Borrowing Duration for Book Recommendation

Traditional book recommendation methods predominantly rely on collaborative filtering and context-based approaches. However, existing methods fail to account for the order of users’ book borrowings and the duration they hold them, both of which are crucial indicators reflecting users’ book preferences. To address this challenge, we propose a book recommendation framework called DPBD, which disentangles preferences based on borrowing duration, thereby explicitly modeling temporal patterns in library borrowing behaviors. The DPBD model adopts a dual-path neural architecture comprising the following: (1) The item-level path utilizes self-attention networks to encode historical borrowing sequences while incorporating borrowing duration as an adaptive weighting mechanism for attention score refinement. (2) The feature-level path employs gated fusion modules to effectively aggregate multi-source item attributes (e.g., category and title), followed by self-attention networks to model feature transition patterns. The framework subsequently combines both path representations through fully connected layers to generate user preference embeddings for next-book recommendation. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world university library datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed DPBD model compared with baseline methods. Specifically, the model achieved 13.67% and 15.75% on HR@1 and 15.75% and 12.90% on NDCG@1 across the two datasets.