  Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) were recently proposed for the session-based
recommendation task. The models showed promising improvements over traditional
recommendation approaches. In this work, we further study RNN-based models for
session-based recommendations. We propose the application of two techniques to
improve model performance, namely, data augmentation, and a method to account
for shifts in the input data distribution. We also empirically study the use of
generalised distillation, and a novel alternative model that directly predicts
item embeddings. Experiments on the RecSys Challenge 2015 dataset demonstrate
relative improvements of 12.8% and 14.8% over previously reported results on
the Recall@20 and Mean Reciprocal Rank@20 metrics respectively.
