  User response prediction, which models the user preference w.r.t. the
presented items, plays a key role in online services. With two-decade rapid
development, nowadays the cumulated user behavior sequences on mature Internet
service platforms have become extremely long since the user's first
registration. Each user not only has intrinsic tastes, but also keeps changing
her personal interests during lifetime. Hence, it is challenging to handle such
lifelong sequential modeling for each individual user. Existing methodologies
for sequential modeling are only capable of dealing with relatively recent user
behaviors, which leaves huge space for modeling long-term especially lifelong
sequential patterns to facilitate user modeling. Moreover, one user's behavior
may be accounted for various previous behaviors within her whole online
activity history, i.e., long-term dependency with multi-scale sequential
patterns. In order to tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose a
Hierarchical Periodic Memory Network for lifelong sequential modeling with
personalized memorization of sequential patterns for each user. The model also
adopts a hierarchical and periodical updating mechanism to capture multi-scale
sequential patterns of user interests while supporting the evolving user
behavior logs. The experimental results over three large-scale real-world
datasets have demonstrated the advantages of our proposed model with
significant improvement in user response prediction performance against the
state-of-the-arts.
