Dual-channel time-aware graph attention network for session-based recommendation

Session-based recommender systems face significant challenges in accurately predicting user preferences due to the limited availability of long-term historical interactions. While recent advances in deep learning and graph-based approaches have improved recommendation performance, the temporal aspects of user interactions remain underutilized. This paper identifies three critical temporal challenges in session-based recommendations: interest shifts indicated by long intervals between interactions, interaction noise from brief engagements, and system popularity effects during high-traffic periods. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Dual-channel Time-aware Graph Attention Network (DT-GAT) to incorporate temporal signal, i.e., time intervals between interactions and time differences between sessions, into session representations from both item and session perspectives. The item-wise learning channel employs a temporal graph attention network to capture interest shifts and filter interaction noise, while the session-wise learning channel utilizes a temporal graph attention network to handle inconsistent popularity trends. Additionally, we introduce a multi-temporal window processing mechanism to construct robust session representations that effectively capture short-term interests while filtering noise. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that DT-GAT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/downw/DT-GAT • We propose DT-GAT to integrate item- and session-level temporal signals. • Dual temporal GATs capture dependencies via temporal intra- and inter-session graphs. • Contrastive learning aligns dual channels to enhance session representations. • Experiments on three datasets validate the effectiveness of DT-GAT.