Including "Unrecommendable" Items

[Jamey Wood <ja...@gmail.com>]

Is there any best practice for including user preferences for certain items
as a Recommender input, but ensuring that those items are never included in
actual recommendations?

For example, suppose that Amazon wanted to produce book recommendations for
you.  They might still want to include your non-book purchases as inputs to
the Recommender (as your taste in DVDs might be quite relevant, for
example).  But they would never want those non-book items to show up as
recommendation outputs (for this particular scenario).  Is there some
elegant way to accomplish this with Mahout?  Or would you just need to
implement your own post-processing logic to remove the non-book items?  Or
is this all a bad idea in general?

Thanks,
Jamey

Re: Including "Unrecommendable" Items

[Ted Dunning <te...@gmail.com>]

Yes...

I always forget about that.  You must have mentioned this half a dozen
times.

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Sean Owen <sr...@gmail.com> wrote:

> (PS that's exactly Rescorer's role... just a hook for whatever biz
> logic you want to filter by)
>
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Ted Dunning <te...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I usually just post process the recommendations using a variety of
> business logic rules.
>

Re: Including "Unrecommendable" Items

[Jamey Wood <ja...@gmail.com>]

Great.  Thank you both!

--Jamey

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Sean Owen <sr...@gmail.com> wrote:

> (PS that's exactly Rescorer's role... just a hook for whatever biz
> logic you want to filter by)
>
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Ted Dunning <te...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I usually just post process the recommendations using a variety of
> business logic rules.
>

Re: Including "Unrecommendable" Items

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

(PS that's exactly Rescorer's role... just a hook for whatever biz
logic you want to filter by)

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Ted Dunning <te...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I usually just post process the recommendations using a variety of business logic rules.

Re: Including "Unrecommendable" Items

[Ted Dunning <te...@gmail.com>]

I usually just post process the recommendations using a variety of business logic rules. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 18, 2011, at 14:26, Jamey Wood <ja...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there any best practice for including user preferences for certain items
> as a Recommender input, but ensuring that those items are never included in
> actual recommendations?
> 
> For example, suppose that Amazon wanted to produce book recommendations for
> you.  They might still want to include your non-book purchases as inputs to
> the Recommender (as your taste in DVDs might be quite relevant, for
> example).  But they would never want those non-book items to show up as
> recommendation outputs (for this particular scenario).  Is there some
> elegant way to accomplish this with Mahout?  Or would you just need to
> implement your own post-processing logic to remove the non-book items?  Or
> is this all a bad idea in general?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jamey

Re: Including "Unrecommendable" Items

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

Yes just include the item in the DataModel but filter it at runtime
with a Rescorer. This sounds like exactly what you are looking for.

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 10:26 PM, Jamey Wood <ja...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there any best practice for including user preferences for certain items
> as a Recommender input, but ensuring that those items are never included in
> actual recommendations?
>
> For example, suppose that Amazon wanted to produce book recommendations for
> you.  They might still want to include your non-book purchases as inputs to
> the Recommender (as your taste in DVDs might be quite relevant, for
> example).  But they would never want those non-book items to show up as
> recommendation outputs (for this particular scenario).  Is there some
> elegant way to accomplish this with Mahout?  Or would you just need to
> implement your own post-processing logic to remove the non-book items?  Or
> is this all a bad idea in general?
>
> Thanks,
> Jamey
>