3 ms·

The blog post was a bit confusing in the way it was structured, and I'm still not quite sure I understood you correctly: You start off by saying that content-ba

The blog post was a bit confusing in the way it was structured, and I'm still not quite sure I understood you correctly: You start off by saying that content-based recommendations are what most people usually have in mind when they have recommender systems. Then, you suggest that actually in many real-life situations those systems are kinda terrible to actually meaningfully move the ball forward on offering recommendations that are non-obvious to users. But then you show a nice implementation of just one-such system which you just said may not be entirely useful for a lot of things, and when paired with the other algorithm often contributes very little... is that right? As a reader, with all of that intro, I couldn't help but be really disappointed that the implementation discussed wasn't the one relying on buying behavior... seems like a good chunk of the article is devoted to explaining why that one is a superior recommendation system, so naturally I wanted to see how you'd go about putting THAT together...

numlocked 10y ago
Great feedback, thanks. I just made some revisions to try and make the narrative arc clearer. To clarify here as well: - CF techniques are definitely superior for answering the question "what else might this user want to buy?" in a generic way, when you have preference/purchase data for that user. - Content-based techniques are great for making recommendations in a context where what you really want is something more akin to automatic curation, and you may not have the necessary preference information about a visitor to apply CF (e.g. an anonymous user viewing a product details page, vs. a logged in user who has previously bought products). A content-based approach can solve the cold-start problem for CF. You're right that I could have done a much better job in the original post -- I've since added information to the effect of the above. Thanks very much for the comment!

numlocked 10y ago

Great feedback, thanks. I just made some revisions to try and make the narrative arc clearer. To clarify here as well: - CF techniques are definitely superior for answering the question "what else might this user want to buy?" in a generic way, when you have preference/purchase data for that user. - Content-based techniques are great for making recommendations in a context where what you really want is something more akin to automatic curation, and you may not have the necessary preference information about a visitor to apply CF (e.g. an anonymous user viewing a product details page, vs. a logged in user who has previously bought products). A content-based approach can solve the cold-start problem for CF. You're right that I could have done a much better job in the original post -- I've since added information to the effect of the above. Thanks very much for the comment!