Returning is believing: Optimizing long-term user engagement in recommender systems

In this work, we propose to improve long-term user engagement in a recommender system from the perspective of sequential decision optimization, where users' click and return behaviors are directly modeled for online optimization. A bandit-based solution is formulated to balance three competing factors during online learning, including exploitation for immediate click, exploitation for expected future clicks, and exploration of unknowns for model estimation. We rigorously prove that with a high probability our proposed solution achieves a sublinear upper regret bound in maximizing cumulative clicks from a population of users in a given period of time, while a linear regret is inevitable if a user's temporal return behavior is not considered when making the recommendations. Extensive experimentation on both simulations and a large-scale real-world dataset collected from Yahoo frontpage news recommendation log verified the effectiveness and significant improvement of our proposed algorithm compared with several state-of-the-art online learning baselines for recommendation.