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The success of cross-domain recommender systems in capturing user interests across multiple domains has recently brought much attention to them. These recommender systems aim to improve the quality of suggestions and defy the cold-start problem by transferring information from one (or more) source domain(s) to a target domain. However, most cross-domain recommenders ignore the sequential information in user history. They only rely on an aggregate or snapshot of user feedback in the past. Most importantly, they do not explicitly model how users transition from one domain to another domain as users continue to interact with different item domains. In this paper, we argue that between-domain transitions in user sequences are useful in improving recommendation quality, dealing with the cold-start problem, and revealing interesting aspects of how user interests transform from one domain to another. We propose TransCrossCF, transition-based cross-domain collaborative filtering, that can capture both within and between domain transitions of user feedback sequences while understanding the relationship between different item types in different domains. Specifically, we model each purchase of a user as a transition from his/her previous item to the next one, under the effect of item domains and user preferences. Our intensive experiments demonstrate that TransCrossCF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in recommendation task on three real-world datasets, both in the cold-start and hot-start scenarios. Moreover, according to our context analysis evaluations, the between-domain relations captured by TransCrossCF are interpretable and intuitive.
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