What are the business cases for collaborative filtering?

[Sean Owen <sr...@gmail.com>]

I mentioned this to Otis but thought I'd expand it --

As some of you may know I am actually an MBA student. I have worked on
the collaborative filtering portion of Mahout (formerly called Taste)
for several years. I have always been curious to know what, exactly,
enterprises need out of collaborative filtering. What product would
they like to see?

Now I have the opportunity to use this as the basis of a business
school project. So I am wondering if anyone can comment on any of
these questions, without naming names if it's confidential --

- What do enterprises imagine they can get out of collaborative filtering?
- At what stage is the interest -- barely know about it, ready to use it, other?
- What do people use to solve these needs today, custom code, other products?
- What's the biggest need enterprises have from collaborative
filtering products or services?
- What's the one product or feature an enterprise would love to see in
the market, in terms of CF?

Thanks for any thoughts, folks!
Sean

Re: What are the business cases for collaborative filtering?

[Sean Owen <sr...@gmail.com>]

Thanks to everyone for the great replies. I am beginning to
synthesize, from these and other responses, some needs:


1) "Just Work": Provide a tool that works out of the box in as many
situations as possible without having to write code, pick algorithms,
etc.

2) Work Better: Produce better recommendations.

3) Work Faster: Run faster / scale better

4) Explore My Data: Explore clusters of users, clusters of items, why
items are recommended, etc., perhaps with a visual tool?

5) Specialize for Common Domains: Begin adding some frameworks or
pre-made solutions that are appropriate for particular, common domains
like advertising, books, etc.

6) Analytics: Now that I've implemented CF, how is it helping my metrics?


For my purposes, and at the moment this is just an idea for an
assignment, I am trying to separate what needs should be answered by
Mahout versus some kind of commercial enterprise system built on top.
If you're saying, hey, why not build this all as open-source, I'd just
say, I don't think much of this would be interesting for the community
to spend time building. It may well be properly the province of
commercial products (think MySQL or JBoss and their enterprise
components.)


I think 2 and 3 are general goals that the core, open library should
continue to strive for. The rest seem like good beginnings of problems
to solve for enterprises.

6 seems more appropriate for analytics tools; doesn't seem like
something one necessarily needs from a CF system itself.


5 is absolutely right -- I think a specialized recommender will always
do better than a general one, and performance is so crucial, that
enterprises need custom solutions. I can see a need for
specializations of the general algorithms, which may not be of general
interest. The question is, which industries to tackle? and, how to
even begin to gain experience in them? But that would be some real
value-add a product could bring to an enterprise.

1 and 4 seem like the more immediate, solvable issues. Yes, lots of
folks understand this idea of recommending books and such based on
ratings. Some people have a business with ratings. The next logical
step should be just that simple: run a demo with minimal set up
against your existing data and see what happens -- maybe show off user
clusters and example recommendations and comparisons of
recommendations versus actual preferences.

Assuming the results are decent, I think that sort of plug-and-play
access to this technology is really valuable. Right now one really has
to be a developer and a bit of a specialist to begin to apply the
framework. Where there is value... there is a product idea!


 More on this as it develops.


On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Sean Owen <sr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I mentioned this to Otis but thought I'd expand it --
>
> As some of you may know I am actually an MBA student. I have worked on
> the collaborative filtering portion of Mahout (formerly called Taste)
> for several years. I have always been curious to know what, exactly,
> enterprises need out of collaborative filtering. What product would
> they like to see?
>
> Now I have the opportunity to use this as the basis of a business
> school project. So I am wondering if anyone can comment on any of
> these questions, without naming names if it's confidential --
>
> - What do enterprises imagine they can get out of collaborative filtering?
> - At what stage is the interest -- barely know about it, ready to use it, other?
> - What do people use to solve these needs today, custom code, other products?
> - What's the biggest need enterprises have from collaborative
> filtering products or services?
> - What's the one product or feature an enterprise would love to see in
> the market, in terms of CF?
>
> Thanks for any thoughts, folks!
> Sean
>

Re: What are the business cases for collaborative filtering?

[Ian Holsman <li...@holsman.net>]

Sean Owen wrote:
> I mentioned this to Otis but thought I'd expand it --
>
> As some of you may know I am actually an MBA student. I have worked on
> the collaborative filtering portion of Mahout (formerly called Taste)
> for several years. I have always been curious to know what, exactly,
> enterprises need out of collaborative filtering. What product would
> they like to see?
>   

Hi Sean.
as a ex-MBA student (I got it last year) and a guy who managed to get 
this on his companies radar I might be able to help ;-)

> Now I have the opportunity to use this as the basis of a business
> school project. So I am wondering if anyone can comment on any of
> these questions, without naming names if it's confidential --
>
> - What do enterprises imagine they can get out of collaborative filtering?
>   

Firstly we are a 'consumer web site', different businesses will have 
different value drivers. We don't sell things , but rely on advertising 
as our primary revenue driver. (for Advertising the 2 things that 
influence that is how many people click through/see the ad, and how much 
we can charge for it).

we also have other KPIs that we believe are lead indicators. (that is we 
increases these and the money will follow).

They are engagement (time spent on the page), page views and return visits.

we see CF as a way of increasing most of these.

In advertising we can use it to put more relevant ads (behavioral 
targeting) in front of the user increasing the chance they will click on 
it, and conversly give us a wider selection of ads to choose to put on 
the page (higher RPM).

on the content side, if we can use CF to create a better experience for 
the user, they will a) come back b) tell their friends. you can check 
out baynote.com if you want some marketing whitepapers on how they sell 
it for more detailed examples.
> - At what stage is the interest -- barely know about it, ready to use it, other?
>   

actively developing several applications that make use of basic CF, and 
researching other more advanced uses.
> - What do people use to solve these needs today, custom code, other products?
>   
mahout naturally
> - What's the biggest need enterprises have from collaborative
> filtering products or services?
>   
a way to measure how effective CF products are, and a easy way to 
install it on a given site.
> - What's the one product or feature an enterprise would love to see in
> the market, in terms of CF?
>   

get your own business plan ideas ;-) I'll keep my itches to pitch to my 
VCs ;-)
> Thanks for any thoughts, folks!
> Sean
>
>   
regards
Ian