Recommender Systems

Customization
Customization is one of the more attractive features of electronic commerce.
Creating a different product for every user, suited to his/her tastes.

Once thought to be a novelty, now essential

Provides a way for online providers to compete with brick-and-mortar competitors. Possible to serve niche markets. Bezos: If I have two million customers on the Web, then I should have two million stores on the Web
(how dated is that? )

How can personalization help?

Turn browsers into buyers
People may go to Amazon without a specific purchase in mind. Showing them something they want can spur a purchase.

Cross-sales
Customers who have bought a product are suggested related products.

Encourages Loyalty
Amazon is interested in becoming an e-commerce portal. This means that they would like to respond to all your online purchasing needs.

Examples
Amazon
Featured Recommendations: tailored to past views/purchases. People who bought this: compares customers Alerts- sends you email when stuff you like is on sale. Customer reviews ListMania
Allows users to add their own reviews of products. Customers can find other reviews by a given user.

Examples
Netflix
You rate movies and others are suggested based on these ratings. You are compared to other users.

Reel.com
Movie Matches you enter a movie, and it suggests similar movies. Compares movies to movies.

Examples
Citeseer
Recommends papers based on citations, similar text, cited by.

Launch
Lets you customize your own radio station.
You get a customized mp3 stream

Types of recommendations
Population-based
For example, the most popular news articles, or searches, or downloads. Useful for sites that frequently add content. No user tracking needed.

Netflix: Movers on the top 100

Reflects movies that have been popular overall.

Types of recommendations
Item-to-item
Content-based One item is recommended based on the users indication that they like another item.
If you like Lord of the Rings, youll like Legend.

Netflix: 1-5 star rating.

Estimates how much youll like a movie based on your past ratings.

Types of Recommendations
Challenges with item-to-item:
Getting users to tell you what they like
Both financial and time reasons not to.

Getting enough data to make novel predictions.

What users really want are recommendations for things theyre not aware of.

Types of recommendations
Item-to-item
Most effective when you have metadata that lets you automatically relate items. Genre, actors, director, etc.

Also best when decoupled from payment

Users should have an incentive to rate items truthfully.

Types of recommendations
User-based
Users who bought X like Y. Each user is represented by a vector indicating his ratings for each product. Users with a small distance between each other are similar. Find a similar user and recommend things they like that you havent rated.

Netflix: Users who liked

Types of recommendations
User-based
Advantages:
Users dont need to rate much. No info about products needed. Easy to implement

Disadvantages
Pushes users toward the middle products with more ratings carry more weight. How to deal with new products? Many products and few users -> lots of things dont get recommended.

Types of Recommendations
Manual/free-form
Users write reviews for a product, which are attached to the product.

Advantages:
Natural language, explanations for pros/cons, users get to participate.

Disadvantages:
Few neutral recommendations, difficult to automate.

Netflix: Member Reviews, Critic Reviews

Potential Applications
Placing a product in space
The product youre looking at is like

Configuring display
Choosing what to show or emphasize based on preferences.

Personalized discounts/coupons
Grocery stores do this.

Clustering users
Determining the tastes of your consumers.

Details: How RS work

Content-based (user-based) systems try to learn a model of a users preferences. This is a function that, for each user, maps an item, to an indication of how much the user likes it.
Might be yes/no or probabilistic.

How RS work
A common model-learner is a nave Bayes classifier. An item is represented as a feature vector.
Web pages: list/bag of possible words Movies: list of possible actors, directors, etc.

This vector is large, so common features are filtered out. (the, an, etc) Useful for unstructured data such as text

Nave Bayes Classifier

Maps from an input vector to a probability of liking.
Nave: assumes inputs are independent of each other.

Probability that an item j belongs to class i, given a set of attribitutes: P(Ci | A1=v1 & A2=v2 An=vn) If all As independent, we can use: P(Ci) = P P(A = Vj | Ci)
(this is easy to compute)

Pick the C with the highest probability.

Training a Nave Bayes Classifier

How do we know P(A = vj | Ci)? User labels data for us (says what she likes). For each class, we compute the fraction of times that A=vj

Example
Two classes (yes, no) Three documents, each of which have four words. D1: {cat, dog, fly, cow} -> yes D2: {crow, straw, fly, zebra} -> no D3: {cat, dog, zoom, flex} -> yes Number of unique words in yes: 6 Number of unique words in no: 4 Total # of words: 9

Example
P(cat | yes): 2/6 P(cat | no): 0/6 P(yes | {cat, zoom, fly, dog}) = 2/6 * 1/6 * 1/6 * 2/6 = 0.003 P(no | {cat, zoom, fly, dog}) = e * e * 1/4 * e ~ 0.00025 (epsilon helps us deal with sparse data)

Rule-learning algorithms
If data is structured, rules can be learned for classification
Director=kubrick && star=mcdowell -> like Title=police academy* -> not like

These rules can be stored efficiently as a decision tree

Tests at each node.

Fast, easy to learn, can handle noise

Decision Trees
Title=Police Academy yes Not like no Director=kubrick

yes
Star=mcdowell yes no

no

like

Other model-learning approaches

TFIDF
Produces similar results to Nave Bayes

Neural Net
Learns a nonlinear function mapping features to classes. More powerful, but results can be hard to interpret.

Comparing users to users

Often, its easier to compare users to other users.
Less data needed No knowledge of items required.

Typical approach involves nearest-neighbor classification.

Nearest-neighbor classification
We create a feature vector for each user containing an element for each ratable item. To compare two users, we compute the Euclidean distance between the filled-in elements of their feature vectors. Sqrt(Si(|uji uki)2) To recommend, find a similar user, then find things that user rated highly.

Example
Say our domain consists of four movies:
Police Academy Clockwork Orange Lord of the Rings Titanic

We represent this as a four-tuple:

<r1, r2, r3, r4>

Example
We currently have three users in the system
u1: <10, 3, 9, -> u2: <-, 9, 6, 2> u3: <1, 7, -, 3>

A new user u4, comes in.

<9, -,-,->

Most similar to u1, so we would recommend they see Lord of the Rings and avoid Clockwork Orange

Personal and Ethical Issues

How to get users to reveal their preferences? How to get users to rate all products equally (not just ones they love or hate) Users may be reluctant to give away personal data. Users may be upset by preferential treatment.

Summary
Recommender systems allow online retailers to customize their sites to meet consumer tastes.
Aid browsing, suggest related items.

Personaliztion is one of e-commerces advantages compared to brick-and-mortar stores. Challenges: obtaining and mining data, making intelligent and novel recommendations, ethics. Can perform comparisons across users or across items.
Trade off data needed versus detail of recommendation.