The wonderful world of recommender systems

Yanir Seroussi

yanirseroussi.com | @yanirseroussi | linkedin.com/in/yanirseroussi

Note: This talk is also available as a blog post.

Overview

  • Motivation
  • What are recommender systems
  • Recommendation paradigms
  • Myth busting

Motivation: why care about recommender systems?

Because money

For companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, recommender systems drive significant engagement and revenue

Because value

Recommender systems provide a scalable way of personalising content for users in scenarios with many items

Recommender systems: a true data science problem

...at least according to my favourite definition of data science

Defining recommender systems

Wikipedia is wrong

Recommender systems ... are a subclass of information filtering system that seek to predict the 'rating' or 'preference' that a user would give to an item.

- Wikipedia (retrieved 28 September 2015)

There's more to it than rating prediction

Recommender is a misnomer – discovery assistant is better

System means elements like presentation are important

My definition

Recommender systems are systems that help users discover items they may like

Recommendation paradigms

Collaborative filtering

Given a matrix of preferences by users for items, predict missing preferences and recommend items with high predictions

Advantages

  • Huge amount of research, well-understood
  • Independent of item properties

Limitations

  • Hard to deal with cold start, sparseness
  • Often underperforms in reality

Content-based

Given user preferences for items, recommend similar items based on item content

Advantages

  • No need for much initial user feedback
  • Easy to implement when item metadata is available

Limitations

  • Recommendations may be static and homogeneous
  • Measuring similarity is hard for some items

Social & demographic

Recommend items that are liked by friends, friends of friends, and demographically similar people

Advantages

  • No need for any user feedback – friend list is enough
  • Trivially-implemented approaches can be depressingly accurate

Limitations

  • Social graph and demographic data may not be available
  • Privacy and creepiness issues

Contextual

Recommend items that match the user's current context

Advantages

  • Adaptive and flexible
  • More likely to elicit a response than approaches based on historical data

Limitations

  • Contextual data may not be available
  • Creepiness – may not be suitable to use contextual data

In practice: all of the above (and more)

Myth busting

The accuracy myth

Offline optimisation of an accuracy measure is enough

Reality: Users don't really care about accuracy

Why don't users care about accuracy?

They care, but not that much...

  • UI/UX is king
  • Other things matter: diversity, coverage, trust, serendipity, privacy, adaptivity, and more
  • High predictive accuracy on low ratings is useless
  • Offline datasets are biased – data isn't missing at random

Accuracy lessons from Netflix

Our business objective is to maximize member satisfaction and month-to-month subscription retention... Now it is clear that the Netflix Prize objective, accurate prediction of a movie's rating, is just one of the many components of an effective recommendation system that optimizes our members' enjoyment.

- Netflix blog, 2012

The black box myth

You can build successful recommender systems without worrying about what's being recommended and how recommendations are served

Reality: UI/UX is king, item type is critical

Example: Hynt recommendation widget

  • Above the fold is better than below
  • More recommendations are better than a few
  • Desktop is better than mobile
  • Fast is better than slow

The right explanation can change everything

Aim Definition
Transparency Explain how the system works
Scrutability Allow users to tell the system it is wrong
Trust Increase user confidence in the system
Effectiveness Help users make good decisions
Persuasiveness Convince users to try or buy
Efficiency Help users make decisions faster
Satisfaction Increase ease of usability or enjoyment

- A survey of explanations in recommender systems (Tintarev and Masthoff)

Example: Amazon & Netflix explanations

The solved problem myth

The space of recommender systems has been exhaustively explored

Reality: Development of new methods is often required

Example: The original Giveable problem

Recommend gifts for Facebook friends using liked pages

  • Need to consider giver and receiver
  • Likes are historical and sparse
  • Likes are not for recommended items
  • Likes not always available offline

Example: Initial Giveable solutions

Offline

  • Infer similar pages with collaborative filtering
  • Match pages to products with heuristics + Mechanical Turk + machine learning
  • Enrich page and product data with Freebase

Online

  • Pages + inferred likes → gift recommendations + reasons

The silver bullet myth

Optimising a single measure or using a single algorithm is enough

Reality: Hybrids work best

Another Netflix example: list of lists

Optimising each list's ranking and list ordering, while considering device-specific UI constraints, relevance, engagement, diversity, business constraints, and more...

- Netflix blog, 2015

Giveable/Hynt: single list, many algorithms

Generated a single list by statically mixing the outputs of the following algorithms:

  • Contextual
  • Direct likes
  • Inferred likes
  • Content-based
  • Social
  • Collaborative filtering of products
  • Previously viewed
  • Popular interests/products

Contextual bandits: the next logical step

A static mix of different approaches can get you very far, but there's a better way

The RichRelevance solution

  • Train recommendation models offline, using a small number of strategies
  • Serve recommendations from strategies that maximise clickthrough and revenue given a context with features describing the user, merchant, and webpage
  • Continuously explore and improve the model

The omnipresence myth

Every personalised system is a recommender system

Reality: It's kinda true, but not necessarily useful...

Web search as a recommender system?

Web search is a recommender system for pages that gives high weight to the user's intent/query

When personalising web search, it seems sensible to use collaborative filtering techniques

My Yandex competition experience: matrix factorisation was a waste of time compared to domain-specific methods

Recommenders are as murky as data science

Just like data science:

  • The bounds of recommender systems are hard to define
  • Recommender systems are sometimes over-hyped
  • There is a lot of value in recommender systems
  • Using the recommender hammer to drive every possible nail is likely to lead to poor results and dissatisfaction

Questions?