  Since sequential information plays an important role in modeling user
behaviors, various sequential recommendation methods have been proposed.
Methods based on Markov assumption are widely-used, but independently combine
several most recent components. Recently, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) based
methods have been successfully applied in several sequential modeling tasks.
However, for real-world applications, these methods have difficulty in modeling
the contextual information, which has been proved to be very important for
behavior modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named Context-Aware
Recurrent Neural Networks (CA-RNN). Instead of using the constant input matrix
and transition matrix in conventional RNN models, CA-RNN employs adaptive
context-specific input matrices and adaptive context-specific transition
matrices. The adaptive context-specific input matrices capture external
situations where user behaviors happen, such as time, location, weather and so
on. And the adaptive context-specific transition matrices capture how lengths
of time intervals between adjacent behaviors in historical sequences affect the
transition of global sequential features. Experimental results show that the
proposed CA-RNN model yields significant improvements over state-of-the-art
sequential recommendation methods and context-aware recommendation methods on
two public datasets, i.e., the Taobao dataset and the Movielens-1M dataset.
