Beyond collaborative filtering: The list recommendation problem

Abstract

Most Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are optimized using a dataset of isolated user-item tuples. However, in commercial applications recommended items are usually served as an ordered list of several items and not as isolated items. In this setting, inter-item interactions have an effect on the list's Click-Through Rate (CTR) that is unaccounted for using traditional CF approaches. Most CF approaches also ignore additional important factors like click propensity vari-ation, item fatigue, etc. In this work, we introduce the list recommendation problem. We present useful insights gleaned from user behavior and consumption patterns from a large scale real world recommender system. We then pro-pose a novel two-layered framework that builds upon ex-isting CF algorithms to optimize a list's click probability. Our approach accounts for inter-item interactions as well as additional information such as item fatigue, trendiness patterns, contextual information etc. Finally, we evaluate our approach using a novel adaptation of Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) which facilitates off-policy estimation of our method's CTR and showcases its effectiveness in real-world settings.