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Recommender Systems: Machine Learning-Based Personalization

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05th Sep, 2023
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    Recommender Systems: Machine Learning-Based Personalization

    Companies are always looking to implement recommender systems leveraging data and AI to tailor services that resonate with their users' preferences to improve the user experience. We find that machine learning for recommender systems helps these systems effectively predict and suggest items that align with the users' unique tastes and interests while providing a truly personalized experience. Go for the best Machine Learning certification to better understand machine learning concepts and their applications. Let us discover the role of personalization and explore the different recommender systems along with their inner workings, and advancements and examine their impact on our everyday lives.

    Personalization and Recommender Systems in a Nutshell

    Every business is keen on improving its performance by achieving higher customer satisfaction. It is possible with personalization. Just as we pick gifts for our friends by knowing their likes and dislikes, companies can also predict their customers' choices regarding products and services.

    Tailoring products and services in a personalized manner matching the particular needs of customers can enhance the overall user experience. The use of machine learning for recommender systems has been instrumental in helping businesses unlock the true potential of personalization, which has led to the development and growth of recommender systems in the recent past.

    It is possible to create intelligent models with ML and data that can precisely predict customer intent and, as such, provide quality one-to-one recommendations.

    Recommender systems, or recommender engines, are information filtering systems generating individual recommendations in real time. These powerful personalization tools leverage advanced machine learning algorithms and techniques to provide the most relevant suggestions to particular users by learning data and predicting current interests and preferences.

    The more data available to train the machine learning models for recommender systems, the more accurately they predict user preferences for specific products and services.

    How do ML-powered Recommendation Systems Work

    Now let us first understand the conventional shops' sales strategy. Shopkeepers usually serve known regular customers and offer personalized recommendations. However, in case of new customers, they need to chat with them initially to learn about their tastes and preferences to recommend relevant products.

    Shopkeepers segment and group clients into different buyer personas based on their purchasing patterns, interests, gender, and so on, due to which they are able to suggest personalized recommendations.

    Recommender Systems are used as digital sales assistants by online e-commerce sites. These systems categorize customers to recommend suitable products. In contrast to human sellers, who recommend based on their intuition and expertise, recommendation engines use machine learning algorithms to evaluate massive datasets containing consumer information, browsing activity, purchase history, and device usage. This enables individual and group client categorization and tailored suggestions, revealing sales dynamics beyond human comprehension.

    Machine learning algorithms can use seasonality to better target clients. For example, recommending typical Christmas products to boost winter sales in December or adapting streaming services to recommend family-friendly films and documentaries over the weekend for Christmas. Following are four key types of segmentation variables for market segmentation are:

    • Demographic: Age, Gender, Income, Occupation, Education, Marital status, etc.
    • User Behavioral Traits:Purchase patterns, Usage behavior, Customer loyalty, Engagement, etc.
    • Geographic:Location (based on zip code, city, state, country), Time zone, Language, Population density, Climate, etc.
    • Psychographic: Social status, Lifestyle, Personality, Interests, Opinions, etc.

    Types of Recommender Systems

    Typically, a recommender system can predict products and services to deliver relevant recommendations. For example, Amazon, GoodReads, and Booking.com provide product recommendations, while Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram provide content recommendations.

    Typically, recommendations are generated based on a set of users, a collection of items to be recommended to users, and learning a function based on the user's past interaction data that predict the likeliness of an item to a customer.

    There are three main types of Recommender systems. Let us explore each system to understand how they perform.

    1. Collaborative Filtering Recommender System

    This recommender system groups users with shared characteristics and purchase patterns into clusters and provides them with product suggestions based on similar preferences. The main focus is on customers, their opinions on products, and their interactions with the online platform rather than on the items' features.

    It implies that recommender systems in this category will rely on machine learning algorithms (such as clustering models, K-nearest neighbors, matrix factorization, and Bayesian networks) to survey customers' perception of products via user rating, understand who likes what, and offer items already bought by other users with similar tastes.

    Advantages of Collaborative Filtering Recommender System

    • These systems can provide highly relevant recommendations by considering the relationship between products and the users more than the product itself.
    • These systems can work pretty well even without understanding the nature of each item.
    • These can be further improved with additional contextual information (region, time, device, etc.) that complements the user data to accurately define the scenario in which a customer operates and provide more effective suggestions.
    • These systems can predict users' interest in a product they didn't know existed by observing that the same item has caught the attention of other customers with similar interests.

    Disadvantages of Collaborative Filtering Recommender System

    • It suffers from a cold start issue as it tries to provide valuable suggestions to new customers with no purchase history, even after considering several other variables.
    • ML algorithms require substantial computational power to search for purchase patterns among a constantly growing number of users and products, which pose a difficulty in scaling the system further.
    • The system will likely recommend products with many excellent reviews, increasing their popularity compared to new items for sale on the platform.
    • Too many products with an insignificant number of user reviews can reduce the accuracy of recommendations. It also indicates that the system is vulnerable to negative reviews, i.e., competitor rating manipulations.

    2. Content-Based Recommender System

    The Content-based Recommender Systems focus more on product similarity than customer similarity. These systems typically look at the products that other users with similar preferences have purchased or rated highly and recommend those items to the new user.

    Based on these variables, a machine learning system consisting of Bayesian classifiers, decision trees, clustering, and other ML techniques analyzes consumers' purchasing histories. It proposes more items with comparable attributes to those previously purchased and positively reviewed.

    Advantages of Content-based Filtering Recommender System

    • These systems reduce the cons of collaborative recommender systems regarding new products on sale, as the system already has sufficient information regarding each item's features based on the assigned keywords.
    • The recommendations from these systems are often more transparent and explainable than collaborative systems as they are based on specific content attributes and features, allowing users to understand why certain items are recommended to them. This transparency can help build trust and understanding between the user and the recommender system.

    Disadvantages of Content-based Filtering Recommender System

    • These systems require tagging for the products, which is time-consuming, especially on platforms with many products. Even though the cold start issue is reduced, it still exists.
    • These systems may sometimes keep recommending categories of products and content already purchased by a certain user while avoiding new, potentially interesting items.

    3. Hybrid Recommender System

    The third type of recommender system is the hybrid recommender system which has gained popularity in the recent past as it has the potential to overcome some of the limitations of collaborative and content-based recommendation systems. This recommender system combines the advantages of both content-based and collaborative filtering approaches for an improved recommendation.

    For example, such systems might first identify a group of products similar to the product the user is currently browsing for likely purchasing and then use a collaborative filtering approach to decide which products might likely be purchased by the user.

    Advantages of Hybrid Recommender Systems

    • These highly personalized systems provide more detailed recommendations than collaborative and content-based filtering recommendation systems.
    • These systems are frequently more scalable and efficient than pure content-based or collaborative filtering systems.

    Disadvantages of Hybrid Recommender Systems

    • These systems can be highly complex and require large computational power and massive datasets to provide highly accurate recommendations.

    Best Practices for ML-based Recommender Engines

    • ML-based recommender engines are valuable tools for personalization; hence, proper implementation is essential before reaping their benefits by considering the following factors:
    • Selecting the type of recommendation system: The recommendation system type depends on a business's needs and defines the system's architecture, how it generates predictions, and the variables to be prioritized.
    • Customize strategies based on user-driven inputs: Recommender systems must be able to choose between different recommendation strategies to be effective, depending on the stage of the customer journey. A new customer can be shown the "most popular" products on the platform, whereas regular customers can be offered more customized recommendations based on their preferences.
    • Recommendation strategies based on pages: The personalization concept also extends to different page contexts where some specific recommendation strategies might be employed. Generally, displaying "most popular" products is a common choice for home pages. Similarly, the system can recommend "frequently bought together" for cart pages.
    • Tailored recommendation system solutions: Companies can either implement ready-made solutions such as Salesforce, Qubit, Adobe Target Recommendation, Optimizely, Improvado, etc. or create their own fully tailored recommendation systems, provided they can afford the higher upfront costs associated with its development.

    Examples of Recommender Systems

    Let us now look at some recommendation system machine learning examples.

    1. Travel Industry: TripAdvisor is a popular website that uses variables such as user reviews, ratings, travel preferences, and destination attributes to help users discover tailored travel options and plan their trips more effectively. Their recommender system combines collaborative and content-based filtering to provide personalized travel recommendations.
    2. Navigation and Local Services: Google Maps utilizes location-based filtering with variables such as user location, search history, reviews, and ratings to recommend nearby places of interest, restaurants, and businesses. It considers user location, search history, and user-generated content such as reviews and ratings. It helps users discover relevant and highly rated places in their vicinity.
    3. Food Delivery: Uber Eats employs collaborative and content-based filtering to recommend food options to users. By analyzing a user's order history, cuisine preferences, and restaurant ratings, Uber Eats suggests personalized restaurant and menu item recommendations. It helps users discover new dining options, promotes local restaurants, and enhances the overall food delivery experience.

    According to the 2021 Grand View Research's Recommendation Engine Market Report, the market size value was USD 2.29B and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.0% (2021-2028), reaching approximately a forecasted revenue of USD 17.30B. This report also confirms that the largest revenue share comes from the retail segment, which is expected to be the same over the forecast period.

    The report also mentions that increasing adoption of digital technologies with a need to enhance customer experience, i.e., personalization across different industries, are the key driving factors for the implementation of recommender systems in the recent past.

    In addition, the recent Mordor Intelligence's Recommendation Engine Market report mentions the recommendation engine market was valued at USD 4.109B in 2022 and is forecasted to reach USD 21.574B by 2028, registering a CAGR of 33.06%.

    The report mentions increasing demand for the customization of digital commerce across different industries for mobile and web applications to be a key catalyst driving the growth of recommender systems. At the same time, Asia-Pacific will witness the fastest growth in this area.

    Top Recommendation Systems on The Internet

    Following are some of the most popular recommendation systems on the internet:

    • Netflix: Netflix's AI provides highly relevant movie recommendations to its users by relying on ML algorithms that consider different variables (user browsing history, ratings issued, movie type and popularity, seasonal trends, and item-item similarity with previous content) to categorize the groups of movies recommended on its home page.
    • Amazon: The e-commerce giant leverages a recommendation algorithm that combines in-site suggestions based on different strategies such as recommended for you, bought together, users also viewed, recently viewed, etc., with off-site recommendations via email to recommend relevant products or search results to its massive user base.
    • Spotify: The Spotify recommendation system uses reinforcement learning to deliver highly relevant songs to its user. For this, it analyzes the user behavior while playing a particular song and uses it to predict which music a user might genuinely enjoy.
    • YouTube: YouTube uses a recommendation system that considers user clicks, video likes and dislikes, watch time, and shares to personalize the user experience. It then prioritizes and promotes specific videos, suggests channel subscriptions, and provides relevant news.
    • LinkedIn: The popular networking site has a recommendation system that suggests relevant job ads, connections, and courses to its users. Another application, 'LinkedIn Recruiter', can help recruiters scout suitable candidates for an open position and rank them depending on their skills, experience, and likelihood of a response.

    What Does the Future Hold for Recommender Systems

    Recommender systems have established their potential to improve business performance; hence, it is highly likely that the future of recommender systems will be exciting and innovative. As AI technology advances, we expect several significant recommender system developments. Integrating AI and ML techniques, such as reinforcement learning, has made these systems more accurate and personalized. With the rise of deep learning algorithms and natural language processing, these systems will better understand user preferences, leading to highly precise recommendations.

    Additionally, we are beginning to see a convergence of recommender systems with other emerging AI technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Using these, companies can provide immersive shopping experiences where personalized recommendations are seamlessly integrated into virtual environments.

    Furthermore, the ethical considerations surrounding recommender systems have also started to gain attention. Data transparency, fairness, and user control over their data are becoming crucial. Companies must strike the right balance between these to enhance user experiences by making the overall shopping process convenient and satisfying. Moreover, detecting and reducing bias is also an important consideration. Comprehensive Data Science online training can help understand these data science concepts required in machine learning for recommender systems.

    Recommender Systems: Sales Booster or Threat to Privacy

    Recommender systems have undoubtedly proven to drive sales and boost revenue for businesses with personalized recommendations to customers. However, increasing dependence on these recommender systems using machine learning has raised concerns about user privacy due to the collected sensitive information.

    This task raises concerns about how securely this information is stored and used beyond the scope of recommendations. Moreover, these systems can also be considered black boxes where they interpret the available data well, but why they end up providing a certain recommendation is unclear.

    Therefore, the challenge lies in finding a balance between leveraging the benefits of recommender systems for sales growth while safeguarding user privacy. Prioritizing user consent, data security, and transparent practices will help ensure recommendation systems deliver consistent benefits.

    Besides, companies are also exploring privacy-preserving techniques like differential privacy to enhance user trust and protect sensitive information. Thus, it is essential for data science professionals to be aware of machine learning fundamentals for recommender systems. Go for the KnowledgeHut best Machine Learning certification to learn these machine learning concepts.

    Final Words

    Overall, recommender systems and personalization have transformed our digital experiences. With advanced ML algorithms and AI technologies, these systems will become even more accurate and personalized, offering highly precise recommendations and more immersive customer experiences. Thus, the future of recommender systems holds immense potential for enhancing sales and user experiences.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    1. Can machine learning be used for recommendation systems?

    Yes, recommendation systems use Machine learning and are considered a subclass of machine learning which generally deals with product ranking or user ratings.

    2. Which machine learning algorithm is used for recommender systems?

    Building recommender systems with machine learning generally requires algorithms such as K-nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Dimensionality reduction, Bayesian inference, and Neural networks to make better predictions.

    3. How to build a recommendation system using machine learning?

    Building a recommendation system is an iterative process that requires ongoing monitoring and refinement. Following are the key steps to building a recommendation system using machine learning:

    • User Data Collection
    • Data Preprocessing
    • Selecting the appropriate recommendation algorithm
    • Model Training on user data
    • Model evaluation and tuning
    • Deployment and Testing
    • Continual Improvement

    4. Which two techniques do recommender systems use?

    Recommendation systems using machine learning employ the following two techniques for personalization:

    • Collaborative filtering
    • Content-based filtering
    Profile

    Devashree Madhugiri

    Author

    Devashree holds an M.Eng degree in Information Technology from Germany and a background in Data Science. She likes working with statistics and discovering hidden insights in varied datasets to create stunning dashboards. She enjoys sharing her knowledge in AI by writing technical articles on various technological platforms.
    She loves traveling, reading fiction, solving Sudoku puzzles, and participating in coding competitions in her leisure time.

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