Recommender Systems and the Human Factor

Preview:

Citation preview

Recommender Systems and the Human FactorMark GrausNetherlands Machine Learning Meetup

2016/03/16

I’m 50% Machine Learner 50% Psychologist

I’ve been working with ‘recommender systems’ since 2009

Movie Recommender Systems

Website

Personalization

App

Personalization

200

920

1120

16

Content What Are Recommender Systems

Why Machine Learning is not Enough

What are Recommender Systems?

The Machine Learning Behind Recommender Systems

We use historical item-user data to predictunobserved item-user data

Typically big datasets i.e. billions of observations

millions of users

tons of items

Numerous Specifically Designed Algorithms

How I see Recommender Algorithms

Implicit Feedback Explicit Feedback

Collaborative

Content-Based

Distinction 1:Implicit versus Explicit Feedback

Implicit

My actual behavior watching

skipping/stopping

Explicit

The feedback I give star rating

Distinction 1:Considerations

“Oh no! My TiVo thinks I’m gay”

Jeffrey Zaslow, The Wall Street Journal, December 2002

What I Like versus What I Say I Like

Solution: Use a bit of both implicit and explicit

Distinction 2:Content-Based versus Collaborative Filtering

Supervised learning Features are extracted from ‘metadata’

Target variable is rating (explicit) or whether the movie will be watched (implicit)

Genre Director MainActor

Year Rating

The Usual Suspects

Crime Bryan Singer

Kevin Spacey

1995

Titanic Drama JamesCameron

LeonardoDiCaprio

1997

Die Hard Action John McTiernan

Bruce Willis

1988?

Distinction 2:Content-Based versus Collaborative FilteringKNN, Slope One

?

?

Matrix Factorizationbut also FunkSVD, SVD+

Usu

al S

usp

ect

s

Tit

an

ic

Die

Ha

rd

Th

e G

od

fath

er

Jack

Dylan

Olivia

Mark

?

?

?

? ? ?

?

Dimensionality Reduction

Matrix Factorizationbut also FunkSVD, SVD+

Jack

Mark

Olivia Dylan

Content-Based versus Collaborative

Considerations

Metadata availability

Need for explaining

My Approach

Start with Open Source Software Lenskit (Java)

MyMediaLite (C#)

Mahout (Python)

Learn about Recommender Systems and User Base

Scale Up Cassandra

Akka

State-of-the-Art

We can do predictions really well

Challenges Cold Start Problem

Context-Aware Recommendations

Social Recommendations

“Merged accounts”

Why Machine Learning is Not Enough

Recommender System Data is Observable Behavior

Recommendations

Behavior

Recommender System

User Experience

Examples of Things Data Cannot Tell Us

Do I feel my privacy invaded? Am I happy to have American Pie 2 recommended?

Why do people react to recommendations the way they do? Presentation?

Bad Recommendations?

Choice Overload?

We need to do A/B testing and UX measurement

System A System B

What did we learn from surveys?

Satisfaction = Recommendation Set Attractiveness - Choice Difficulty

More views != Satisfaction

Diversity influences Satisfaction

Long Lists = Difficult to Choose

Short Lists = Easier to Choose, but not enough choice

Right Balance = Short Lists of Diverse Items

Take Home Message

The Machine Learning is just the beginning of Recommender Systems

Thank you for listening!

Some Pointers

Recommender Algorithms Yehuda Koren, Google

Introduction to Recommender Systems, Coursera/GroupLens

Infrastructure Netflix Tech Blog

A/B Testing Ron Kohavi, Microsoft Research

User Experience Evaluation in Recommender Systems Bart Knijnenburg, Clemson University