Personalized Recommendation on Dynamic Content Using Predictive Bilinear Models Wei ChuSeung-Taek...

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Personalized Recommendation on Dynamic Content Using Predictive Bilinear Models Wei Chu Seung-Taek Park WWW 2009 Audience Science Yahoo! Labs.

Transcript of Personalized Recommendation on Dynamic Content Using Predictive Bilinear Models Wei ChuSeung-Taek...

Personalized Recommendation on Dynamic Content

Using Predictive Bilinear Models

Wei Chu Seung-Taek Park

WWW 2009

Audience Science

Yahoo! Labs.

Outline

• Dynamic content– Yahoo! Front Page Today Module

– Difficulties on new users and new items

• Personalized recommendation– Global level, “one-size-fits-all” / “most popular”– Segmented level, “segmentation” – Individual level, “personalization”

• Methodology – Predictive bilinear models

• Findings in the case study• Conclusions

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Dynamic Content

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Yahoo! Front Page

• At default, the article at F1 is highlighted at the Story position.• Articles are selected from a hourly-refreshed article pool.• Replacement on out-of-date articles happens every a few hours.• GOAL: select the most attractive article for the Story position to draw

users’ attention and then increase users’ retention.

Dynamic Content

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Today Module

Dynamic Content

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Today Module

a) Click-through rate (CTR) is decaying temporally, e.g. breaking news.

b) About 40% clickers are first-time clickers.

c) Lifetime of an article is usually short, only a few hours;

d) The universe of content pool is dynamic.

9 da

ys’

data

Difficulties on Dynamic Content

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• Collaborative filtering provides good solution to “a closed world”– Overlaps in feedback across users are relatively high

– The universe of content items is almost static

• CTR is decaying temporally– Difficult to compare users’ feedback on the same article received at

different time slots

• Lifetime of an article is usually short, only a few hours– Reduce overlaps in feedback across users

• The universe of content pool is dynamic– Have to wait for clicks on new items (content-based filtering helps)

– Storage and retrieval of historical ratings of retired items are demanding

• About 40% clickers are first-time clickers– Hard on new users without historical ratings (“most popular” is baseline)

Cold-Start Recommendationexisting items new items

existing users Collaborative filtering Content-based filtering

new users “most popular” WAIT

Solution: Feature-based modeling

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• Users with open profiles– Demographical information, age, gender, location

– Property usage over Yahoo! networks

– Search logs, purchase history etc.

• Content profile management– Static descriptors: categories, title, bags of words of textual content etc.

– Temporal characteristics: popularity, CTR, freshness etc.

• Feature-based regression models for personalization at individual level– New items: initialize popularity based on static meta features

– New users: estimate preferences on items based on user features

Methodology

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• Data representation– User features (D features per user)

– Content features (C features per article)

– Historical feedback (“story click” or not)

• Predictive bilinear models– Bilinear score for a user/article pair

the b-th feature of user

the a-th feature of item

affinity between and

affinity sports finance

age 50 0.5 0.8

age 20 0.9 0.2

male 0.6 0.5

1.5

0.7

1.1

1.3

C100

D1000

• Model fitting on historical feedback – Regression on continuous targets

– Logistic regression on binary targets

– Probabilistic framework

• Optimal affinities at maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate

• Prediction

Offline Optimization

affinity sports finance

age 50 ? ?

age 20 ? ?

male ? ?

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affinity sports finance

age 50 0.5 0.8

age 20 0.9 0.2

male 0.6 0.5

1.5

0.7

C100

D1000

• Data collection – Random serving policy

– Temporal partition

– About 40 million events for training

– About 5 million distinct users

– Test events (about 0.6 million “story click”s)

• Offline performance metric– “Click Portion”: the fraction of clicks at rank position r

Case Study

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Application: Front Page Today Module

• Data collection – Random serving policy

– Temporal partition

– About 40 million events for training

– About 5 million distinct users

– Test events (about 0.6 million “story click”s)

• Offline performance metric– “Click Portion”: the fraction of clicks at rank position r

Case Study

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Application: Front Page Today Module

Click Rank : 2at the moment of the click event in test

Like Dislike

• Data collection– Random serving policy

– Temporal partition

– About 40 million events for training

– About 5 million distinct users

– Test events (about 0.6 million “story click”s)

• Offline performance metric– “Click Portion”: the fraction of test clicks at rank r

Case Study

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Application: Front Page Today Module

at the moment of click events in test Click Rank : 1

Like Dislike

Case Study

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• Baseline: select the article with the highest CTR (EMP)– “One-size-fits-all” approach by online CTR tracking (Agarwal et al. NIPS 2009; Agarwal et al. WWW 2009)

• Segmentation– Age/gender-based segmentation with 6 clusters (GM)

– Conjoint analysis with 5 clusters (Chu et al. KDD 2009) (SEG5)

• Collaborative filtering– Item-based collaborative filtering (IBCF)

– Content-based filtering (CB)

– Hybrid CB with CTR (CB+EMP) :

• Feature-based personalized models– Bilinear regression (RG)

– Logistic bilinear regression (LRG)

– LRG without article CTR feature (LRG-CTR)

Matchbox: Large Scale Bayesian Recommendations

Stern, Herbrich and Graepel (WWW2009) Microsoft Res.

Thursday XL-2, Statistical Methods

Case Study

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• Lift over the baseline EMP “one-size-fits-all”

• SEG5: tensor conjoint analysis with 5 clusters

• CB+EMP:

• Logistic Bilinear Models

Case Study

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• A utility function (overall performance at top 4 positions)

where is “Click Portion” at rank r

Bucket Test

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• Lift on offline metric (click portion) of three segmentation models

• Gender: – male, female, unknown

• AgeGender:– 11 segments

• Tensor-5 (SEG5):

– 5 clusters

Method: Tensor-5 > AgeGender > GenderLift at rank 1: 0.08 > 0.65 > 0.55

Bucket Test

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Method: Tensor-5 > AgeGender > GenderLift on offline metric : 8% > 6.5% > 5.5%Lift in online bucket test : 3.24 > 2.45% > 1.49%

Summary

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• Feature-based bilinear regression models for personalized recommendation on cold-start situation of dynamic content.

• The affinities between user attributes and content features are optimized by learning from historical user feedback.

• Alleviate cold-start difficulties by leveraging available information at both user and item sides.

• Significantly outperform six competitive approaches at global, segmented or individual levels on an offline metric.

• We validated our offline metric by bucket test on segmentation models.

Acknowledgment

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We thank our colleague:• Raghu Ramakrishnan• Scott Roy• Deepak Agarwal• Bee-Chung Chen• Pradheep Elango• Ajoy Sojan • Todd Beaupre• Nitin Motgi• Amit Phadke• Seinjuti Chakraborty• Joe Zachariah

Questions?