{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,18]],"date-time":"2026-08-18T01:46:19Z","timestamp":1787017579077,"version":"build-2736575974"},"reference-count":35,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2024,2,28]],"date-time":"2024-02-28T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1709078400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["72271083, 72342011, 72101076, and 72101072"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["72271083, 72342011, 72101076, and 72101072"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100012226","name":"Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["PA2023IISL0090, and JZ2023YQTD0075"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PA2023IISL0090, and JZ2023YQTD0075"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100012226","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,6,30]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>The rapid development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms has created an urgent need for an efficient personalized course recommender system that can assist learners of all backgrounds and levels of knowledge in selecting appropriate courses. Currently, most existing methods utilize a sequential recommendation paradigm that captures the user\u2019s learning interests from their learning history, typically through recurrent or graph neural networks. However, fewer studies have explored how to incorporate principles of human learning at both the course and category levels to enhance course recommendations. In this article, we aim at addressing this gap by introducing a novel model, named Prerequisite-Enhanced Catory-Aware Graph Neural Network (PCGNN), for course recommendation. Specifically, we first construct a course prerequisite graph that reflects the human learning principles and further pre-train the course prerequisite relationships as the base embeddings for courses and categories. Then, to capture the user\u2019s complex learning patterns, we build an item graph and a category graph from the user\u2019s historical learning records, respectively: (1) the item graph reflects the course-level local learning transition patterns and (2) the category graph provides insight into the user\u2019s long-term learning interest. Correspondingly, we propose a user interest encoder that employs a gated graph neural network to learn the course-level user interest embedding and design a category transition pattern encoder that utilizes GRU to yield the category-level user interest embedding. Finally, the two fine-grained user interest embeddings are fused to achieve precise course prediction. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PCGNN compared with other state-of-the-art methods.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3643644","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,29]],"date-time":"2024-01-29T07:38:20Z","timestamp":1706513900000},"page":"1-21","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":16,"title":["Prerequisite-Enhanced Category-Aware Graph Neural Networks for Course Recommendation"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"18","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2981-5812","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jianshan","family":"Sun","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China and KeyLaboratory of Process Optimization and Intelligent Decision Making, Ministry of Education, Hefei, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0003-9413-8843","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Suyuan","family":"Mei","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6542-4483","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kun","family":"Yuan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China and IntelligentInterconnected Systems Laboratory of Anhui Province (Hefei University of Technology), Hefei, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0886-3647","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yuanchun","family":"Jiang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China and Key Laboratory of Philosophy and Social Sciences for Cyberspace Behaviour and Management, Hefei, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7049-5614","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jie","family":"Cao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,2,28]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_3_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.knosys.2013.04.015"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_3_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/1622487.1622499"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_4_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.sbspro.2015.06.395"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_5_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3390\/app11020804"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_6_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1108\/INTR-08-2020-0477"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_7_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3404835.3462932"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_8_2","first-page":"161","article-title":"Translation-based Recommendation","author":"He R. N.","year":"2017","unstructured":"R. N. He, W. C. Kang, and J. McAuley. 2017. Translation-based Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Recsys\u201917).161\u2013169.","journal-title":"In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Recsys\u201917)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_9_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3397271.3401063"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_10_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TKDE.2018.2831682"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_11_2","unstructured":"Bal\u00e1zs Hidasi Alexandros Karatzoglou Linas Baltrunas and Domonkos Tikk. 2015. Session-based recommendations with recurrent neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06939 (2015)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_12_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2959100.2959167"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_13_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/CSCWD.2018.8465266"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_14_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3106426.3106478"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_15_2","first-page":"659","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining","author":"Kabbur Santosh","year":"2014","unstructured":"Santosh Kabbur, Xia Ning, and George Karypis. 2014. FISM: Factored item similarity models for top-n recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 659\u2013667."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_16_2","first-page":"197","article-title":"Self-attentive sequential recommendation","author":"Kang W. C.","year":"2018","unstructured":"W. C. Kang and J. McAuley. 2018. Self-attentive sequential recommendation. In Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.197\u2013206.","journal-title":"In Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_17_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3132847.3132926"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_18_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.knosys.2021.107085"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_19_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.knosys.2020.106558"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_20_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TKDE.2019.2924374"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_21_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3488560.3498505"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_22_2","unstructured":"Steffen Rendle Christoph Freudenthaler Zeno Gantner and Lars Schmidt-Thieme. 2012. BPR: Bayesian personalized ranking from implicit feedback. arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.2618 (2012)."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_23_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1772690.1772773"},{"issue":"9","key":"e_1_3_3_24_2","first-page":"1265","article-title":"An MDP-based recommender system","volume":"6","author":"Shani G.","year":"2005","unstructured":"G. Shani, D. Heckerman, and R. I. Brafman. 2005. An MDP-based recommender system. Journal of Machine Learning Research 6, 9 (2005), 1265\u20131295.","journal-title":"Journal of Machine Learning Research"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_25_2","first-page":"1441","article-title":"BERT4Rec: Sequential recommendation with bidirectional encoder representations from Transformer","author":"Sun F.","year":"2019","unstructured":"F. Sun, J. Liu, J. Wu, C. H. Pei, X. Lin, W. W. Ou, and P. Jiang. 2019. BERT4Rec: Sequential recommendation with bidirectional encoder representations from Transformer. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.1441\u20131450.","journal-title":"In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_26_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TLT.2021.3083180"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_27_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3366423.3380236"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_28_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3366423.3380077"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_29_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3397271.3401142"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_30_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v33i01.3301346"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_31_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1088\/1742-6596\/1673\/1\/012025"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_32_2","first-page":"3940","article-title":"Graph contextualized self-attention network for session-based recommendation","author":"Xu C. F.","year":"2019","unstructured":"C. F. Xu, P. P. Zhao, Y. C. Liu, V. S. Sheng, J. J. Xu, F. Z. Zhuang, J. H. Fang, and X. F. Zhou. 2019. Graph contextualized self-attention network for session-based recommendation. In Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.3940\u20133946.","journal-title":"In Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence."},{"key":"e_1_3_3_33_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s11036-018-1131-y"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_34_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Z. Wang J. Zhang J. Feng and Z. Chen. 2014. Knowledge graph embedding by translating on hyperplanes. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 28 1 (2014).","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v28i1.8870"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_35_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3410441"},{"key":"e_1_3_3_36_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ins.2018.02.053"}],"container-title":["ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3643644","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3643644","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,18]],"date-time":"2025-06-18T18:50:28Z","timestamp":1750272628000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3643644"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2024,2,28]]},"references-count":35,"journal-issue":{"issue":"5","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,6,30]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1145\/3643644"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3643644","relation":{},"ISSN":["1556-4681","1556-472X"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1556-4681","type":"print"},{"value":"1556-472X","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2024,2,28]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2023-07-31","order":0,"name":"received","label":"Received","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2024-01-22","order":1,"name":"accepted","label":"Accepted","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2024-02-28","order":2,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}