Foursquare Recommendation powered by Mahout!

[Robin Anil <ro...@gmail.com>]

http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/03/22/building-a-recommendation-engine-foursquare-style/

Re: Foursquare Recommendation powered by Mahout!

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

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 3:06 PM, Robin Anil <ro...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well thats the implementation detail of the system, there are various
> strategies, driven by various aspects of the product. Not generic like the
> algorithms in Mahout. I dont think its something Mahout should handle
> anyway.
>

Well, there are ways to do various kinds of cold start even in Mahout.

If cold start is really cold, as in complete ignorance, then a diversified
top-hits list is about all you can do.

Foursquare *always* has some information, however.  They have location.
 They have browser (which gives
phone type in many cases).  These can be used as inputs for recommendations
using pretty much our
standard framework.

Re: Foursquare Recommendation powered by Mahout!

[Dmitriy Lyubimov <dl...@gmail.com>]

*I think* there's some space to handle regression hierarchies and
generalize combining methods like here
http://www.ideal.ece.utexas.edu/seminar/LatentFactorModels.pdf  via
mere architectural enhancements to solve those problems but it's all
just an intuition. In particular, I understand this yahoo work as some
sort of a hybrid of factorization, regression on content data and
regression on side data, and conceivably one might generalize
framework enough to plug method that is doing factorization from those
doing regression. Somehow.  E.g. it probably doesn't matter if we want
to handle factorization work using ALS or incremental SVD. We could
build an overarching model that would take that as a parameter for an
algorithm class. Perhaps.

Or perhaps there's not enough space for generalizing this.

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 3:06 PM, Robin Anil <ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well thats the implementation detail of the system, there are various
> strategies, driven by various aspects of the product. Not generic like the
> algorithms in Mahout. I dont think its something Mahout should handle
> anyway.
> It will be great if Foursquare folks on the list can share
> stories/issues/bugs or even patches they made in getting Mahout jobs to run.
> Should help us polish Mahout for a v1.0 milestone.
>
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Dmitriy Lyubimov <dl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hm. they say they had a cold start problem too that Mahout doesn't handle
>> yet.
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Robin Anil <ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/03/22/building-a-recommendation-engine-foursquare-style/
>> >
>
>

Re: Foursquare Recommendation powered by Mahout!

[Robin Anil <ro...@gmail.com>]

Well thats the implementation detail of the system, there are various
strategies, driven by various aspects of the product. Not generic like the
algorithms in Mahout. I dont think its something Mahout should handle
anyway.

It will be great if Foursquare folks on the list can share
stories/issues/bugs or even patches they made in getting Mahout jobs to run.
Should help us polish Mahout for a v1.0 milestone.


On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Dmitriy Lyubimov <dl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hm. they say they had a cold start problem too that Mahout doesn't handle
> yet.
>
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Robin Anil <ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/03/22/building-a-recommendation-engine-foursquare-style/
> >
>

Re: Foursquare Recommendation powered by Mahout!

[Dmitriy Lyubimov <dl...@gmail.com>]

Hm. they say they had a cold start problem too that Mahout doesn't handle yet.

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Robin Anil <ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/03/22/building-a-recommendation-engine-foursquare-style/
>