  Recommender systems easily face the issue of user preference shifts. User
representations will become out-of-date and lead to inappropriate
recommendations if user preference has shifted over time. To solve the issue,
existing work focuses on learning robust representations or predicting the
shifting pattern. There lacks a comprehensive view to discover the underlying
reasons for user preference shifts. To understand the preference shift, we
abstract a causal graph to describe the generation procedure of user
interaction sequences. Assuming user preference is stable within a short
period, we abstract the interaction sequence as a set of chronological
environments. From the causal graph, we find that the changes of some
unobserved factors (e.g., becoming pregnant) cause preference shifts between
environments. Besides, the fine-grained user preference over categories
sparsely affects the interactions with different items. Inspired by the causal
graph, our key considerations to handle preference shifts lie in modeling the
interaction generation procedure by: 1) capturing the preference shifts across
environments for accurate preference prediction, and 2) disentangling the
sparse influence from user preference to interactions for accurate effect
estimation of preference. To this end, we propose a Causal Disentangled
Recommendation (CDR) framework, which captures preference shifts via a temporal
variational autoencoder and learns the sparse influence from multiple
environments. Specifically, an encoder is adopted to infer the unobserved
factors from user interactions while a decoder is to model the interaction
generation process. Besides, we introduce two learnable matrices to disentangle
the sparse influence from user preference to interactions. Lastly, we devise a
multi-objective loss to optimize CDR. Extensive experiments on three datasets
show the superiority of CDR.
