Patent Application
20150170035
Modeling user behavior is of interest in order to provide recommendations of content such as music, movies, games, applications, advertisements, offers, etc. A user may become discouraged if recommendations do not reflect the user's feedback in real-time. Traditional machine learning systems (such as logistic regression or embedding systems) can personalize a user model, but require substantial amounts of data about the user and may not be quick enough to operate in real-time.
According to an implementation of the disclosed subject matter, one or more exemplars may be obtained. Each exemplar may be a representative point in a vector space. One or more items may be obtained. Each item may include a profile in the vector space. A first user interaction for each of the one or more items for a first user may be determined. A weight for the first user interaction may be determined. A first exposure for the first user for each of the one or more exemplars may be determined. The exposure may indicate a first user's preference for an exemplar. A first affinity for an exemplar by the first user may be determined based on the user interaction and the exposure. A first recommendation may be generated based on the affinity for each of the one or more exemplars. The affinity each of the exemplars may be ranked and at least one of the exemplars may be selected based on the ranking A user model may be generated and sent by a server to a mobile device of the user.
In an implementation, a second user interaction may be determined for each of the one or more items and for two or more second users. A second exposure may be determined for the second two or more users for each of the exemplars. A second affinity for the one or more exemplars by the second two or more users may be determined based on the second user interaction and the second exposure. A second recommendation may be generated based on the second affinity for each of the one or more exemplars.
In an implementation, the first recommendation may be truncated to form a truncated recommendation list. The truncated recommendation list may be provided to a mobile device of the first user. A second recommendation list for the first user may be determined. The second recommendation list may be truncated to form a truncated second recommendation list. The truncated recommendation list may be updated to match the truncated second recommendation list.
In an implementation, a system is provided that includes a database and a processor connected thereto. The database may store at least one of a first user interaction, a first exposure, a first affinity, and a first recommendation. The processor may be configured to obtain one or more exemplars. Each exemplar may be a point in a vector space. The processor may be configured to obtain one or more items. Each item may include a profile in the vector space. It may determine the first user interaction for each of the one or more items for a first user. The processor may determine the first exposure for the first user for each of the one or more exemplars. The exposure may indicate a first user's preference for an exemplar. The processor may be configured to determine the first affinity for an exemplar by the first user based on the user interaction and the exposure and generate the first recommendation based on the affinity for each of the one or more exemplars.
An advantage of an implementation as disclosed herein is that a system can be constructed using an embedding system that can perform real time personalization by modeling a user affinity to one or more exemplars. A recommendation may be provided in real time or at each interaction in real time. Additional features, advantages, and implementations of the disclosed subject matter may be set forth or apparent from consideration of the following detailed description, drawings, and claims. Moreover, it is to be understood that both the foregoing summary and the following detailed description provide examples of implementations and are intended to provide further explanation without limiting the scope of the claims.
The accompanying drawings, which are included to provide a further understanding of the disclosed subject matter, are incorporated in and constitute a part of this specification. The drawings also illustrate implementations of the disclosed subject matter and together with the detailed description serve to explain the principles of implementations of the disclosed subject matter. No attempt is made to show structural details in more detail than may be necessary for a fundamental understanding of the disclosed subject matter and various ways in which it may be practiced.
Systems and methods for building a model for a user and/or an item are disclosed herein. An item may refer to anything that can be recommended to a user (examples include music, images, video, advertising, products, events, people, and so on). Both an item and an exemplar may both be users. Users may refer to entities to which a recommendation may be made. Both users and items may be represented in embedded space. An embedded space may be generated using an embedding system such as Web Scale Annotation by Image Embedding (“WSABIE”) or of a type otherwise known as applied to items. An exemplar may be a point in an embedded space and the location of the exemplar within embedded space may change as a user model is refined or updated as described below.
The model can involve listing affinities, as described below, based on their proximity to exemplars. Exemplars may be entities linked in some fashion and may be represented in an embedded space as a point. For example, a first entity may be a comedy club and a second entity may be a comedian. The representation of these two entities may reflect that the comedian is similar to the comedy club in the context of events (e.g., a comedian could be performing at the comedy club). For each exemplar, an affinity and an exposure may be stored, for example, to a database. An embedding space may contain, for example, on the order of millions of items and one hundred or more dimensions. Each of the items may be points represented by a 100 dimensional vector in the vector space. An exemplar may be a point in the embedded space that is selected based on popularity, for example, by performing a clustering on the embedded space. The number of exemplars may be selected as desired, such as one thousand exemplars. For each of the clusters, a point representing the exemplar may be derived from members of the cluster (e.g., a cluster member or an average of the cluster) that is both popular and close to the median of the cluster. A popular exemplar may be selected because it increases the likelihood that a user may interact with it. For example, an exemplar may be professional football and the selected point for the cluster representing that exemplar may be a particularly popular professional football team. Generally, the derived point can be an actual data point in the embedded space as opposed to an average for the cluster to enable a seamless transfer of the data from one user model to the next. For example, when a user model is reconstructed using new data (e.g., user interaction with an exemplar that may include an affinity and exposure), a new user model may be generated.
As disclosed herein, a number of exemplars may be determined based on a clustering analysis. For example, each professional football team may be an item and would be clustered together. One of the professional football teams may be selected as an exemplar. Initially, the selected exemplar for a professional football team may be a popular one to ensure that some feedback is obtained from the user. For example, the football team XYZ may be selected as an exemplar. If the user indicates, however, that team ABC is the user's favorite, which may be determined based on the user's browsing history, purchase history, video habits, geographic location, etc., then the exemplar for this particular user may be changed from team XYZ to team ABC when the model for the user is revised. The system can provide recommendations for merchandise, events, advertisements, coupons, etc. based on the one or more exemplars for a user. For example, initially, the system may have provided an offer for tickets to a user for team XYZ. The user may dismiss that offer or down vote it. After determining the user prefers team ABC, a subsequent offer for tickets to watch team ABC may be met with a positive response, thereby strengthening the user's relationship with team ABC (e.g., causing a higher affinity and/or exposure for team ABC for the particular user, as described below).
For each exemplar for each person, two numbers may be stored. One number is an affinity that indicates whether the person had a positive interaction with the exemplar or not. For example, a thumbs-up on a video or purchase for a particular restaurant may be a positive indicator while a click to dismiss an advertisement may be a negative indicator. Each indication may be assigned a value that represents the user's affinity for the item in question (e.g., a video or restaurant). The other number can be exposure which can represent how much is known about the affinity or how confident the system is in the affinity. A zero may be the exposure if the user has not provided any indication for an item. For example, songs can have a substantial amount of exposure or information about how users interact with them. Events may be short-lived. That is, an event may take place on the weekend and be recommended to a user on the preceding Thursday.
Items in the embedded space may, as for users, receive an affinity and/or exposure number as well. For example, the advertisement that was dismissed by a click in the above example may be an item. It may receive a negative indicator for its affinity because it was dismissed and an exposure since it was presented to the user. For every event, a correlation of likes (i.e., affinity) with each one of a number of exemplars, such as a comedy club, may be determined. Other examples of exemplars may be a particular city, particular sports team, a particular show, etc. When describing people or events, a single number may not be sufficient to represent one or the other in embedded space. For example, a user may prefer heavy metal music and enjoy barbeque. However, that does not necessarily mean that heavy metal and barbeque are like one another with respect to their representations in the embedded space. Thus, the user's taste cannot be represented as a single point in the embedded space.
A user model may be seeded based on a search history, browsing history, purchase history, etc. An event may be seeded with a web reference and placed in embedded space. For example, a web reference may contain one or more nouns that described the content on the page. Some of the web reference affinities may be placed into the model and relate to exemplars. Seeding may refer to initial values assigned to an event, a user, and/or an exemplar. For example, a never-before-seen TV show will not have any user interaction initially; however, it may be seeded based on details about the show (e.g., plot, subject matter, actors, director, etc.) so that it may be recommended to an initial set of users. The initial set of users may provide a response to the TV show and affinity and exposure of the TV show may be adjusted in real time. Thus, in real time, as a user may positively react to an event and the event and the user can be made to look more like one another in the embedded space (i.e., the distance between them may decrease). When the user reacts negatively to an event, the user and the event can be made to look further apart. Thus, the disclosed system can combine a crowd-sourced model of events with collaboratively filtering recommendations to users.
An input for every item xi, iε{1, . . . , xi, . . . , xN} and a list of exemplars m1, . . . , mj, . . . , mE may be obtained. N may refer to the number of items in the data set and E may refer to the number of exemplars. The data may be indexed using i and j for the exemplars. Given a user, u, the weight, wu,i, of the user's interaction with item i may be computed. For example, in a radio model, a weight of 1 may be assigned to each item (e.g., a song) to which the user has listened, an additional weight of 0.5 for a thumbs-up (indicating the user enjoyed the song), a weight of −0.2 if the user skips a song, and an additional weight of −0.5 for a thumbs-down (indicating the user disliked the song). U may be defined as the set of items with which the user has interacted. The user's exposure to an exemplar j may be defined as:
eu,j≡√{square root over (ΣiεU(xiT·xm
The exposure, as stated above, may represent how much knowledge is available about a user's preference for an exemplar. It may not take into account the user interaction weights, wu,i. Exposure may be concerned with whether or not the user has interacted with the item at all. It may be possible for an item U to have wu,i=0. This may indicate that the user was exposed to item, i, but the user did not indicate a positive or negative preference for it.
For a user, u, the user's affinity for the jth exemplar may be computed by summing over the user's interactions as shown in Equation 2:
The affinity, au,j, has the same “units” as the user interaction weights, wu,i. The p's are prior, initial values before the system has observed any user interactions. In Equation 2, the user has a total weighted interaction of pa
In an implementation, an example of which is provided in
A first recommendation, for the first user for example, may be generated based on the first affinity for each of the exemplars at 360. As a user interacts with exemplars over time, the user's affinities for exemplars may be determined and become increasingly accurate because the user will have more exposure to the exemplars over time. A threshold affinity value may be used to establish a cutoff of the items that the system will not use as a basis for a recommendation. A user model may be generated based on the user's interactions with the exemplars. The user model may be sent out via a server to a user's device such as a smartphone or laptop. The user model may be updated in real time as the user interacts with more exemplars and/or items. In an implementation, a second user interaction may be determined for each of the one or more exemplars for two or more users. A second exposure may be determined for the second two or more users for each of the one or more exemplars as described above for a single user. A second affinity may be determined for each of the one or more exemplars by the second two or more users based on the second user interaction and the second exposure. A second recommendation may be generated based on the second affinity for each of the one or more exemplars. Thus, a user model may be generated for each user in the system and updated in real time.
In some configurations, the affinity for each of the exemplars may be ranked and at least one of the exemplars may be selected based on the ranking. The selected exemplar, for example, may serve as the basis for a recommendation for an event, an item, an advertisement, a coupon, etc. For example, if the highest ranking exemplar for the first user is team ABC, the user may receive an advertisement for some team ABC-inspired paraphernalia or a notice that team ABC is playing team XYZ this weekend and a link for a ticket purchase option. A score for item i may be computed as shown in Equation 3 so that a ranked list of candidate items to recommend to the user may be generated.
su,i=Σjau,jai,j√{square root over (eu,j)} Equation 3
Candidates may be ranked based on the user model described by the exemplars. A candidate may be any item represented by a point in the embedded space, including exemplars. In some configurations, a candidate may be represented by a model containing exemplars of its own (as compared to being represented by points in embedded space). In such a configuration, candidate models may vary in time based on feedback or user interaction, allowing the candidate models to be “crowd-sourced.” Each of the candidates and/or candidate models may be ranked using Equation 3 and at least one of the candidates may be selected based on a diversity level. Diversity may refer to the chance that a user will like the candidates selected and can be characterized as a probability. Low diversity may indicate that the user will have a high affinity and high exposure. High diversity may indicate that there is low exposure and, thus, the certainty that the user will like the selected candidates will be reduced. The amount of exposure can be used to tune the diversity of events and/or items the system will recommend. Thus, more exposure may be associated with a less diverse set of events and, conversely, less exposure may be associated with a more diverse set of events. Thus, increasing exposure can improve the likelihood that a user will like the candidates selected. A more diverse group of events and/or items may be utilized to experiment to ascertain more information about the user's preferences. For example, some of the recommendations may be tangentially related to items for which the user has a high affinity, but no direct interaction. This encourages user interaction to expand beyond a few selections for which the user has direct interaction. A diversity level may be a threshold probability that a user will like the recommended event and/or item. A diversity level may be set to select at least one of the ranked items based on Equation 3.
Affinities and exposures are both defined in terms of linear sums over interactions and can be computed incrementally. Therefore, in a dense representation such as the embedded space or vector space, the “state” can be updated by an amount of work proportional to the total number of exemplars. In some instances, a sparse representation may be utilized. The sparse representation may have non-zero affinities for a small number of exemplars for the user and each item may only be represented by its largest (e.g., magnitude) affinities to exemplars.
As stated above, a ranked list of items based on the user's affinities and exposures to each item on the list may be determined. The complete embedded space that contains the data representing the exemplars and the items (e.g., the user model) may be large and computationally cumbersome. In an implementation, the first recommendations may be truncated to form a truncated recommendation list. The truncated recommendation list may be provided to a mobile device of the first user. The truncated recommendation list may refer to a reduced user model. For example, if the top thirty items are selected for the truncated recommendation list based on the user's exposure and affinity, the truncated user model may reflect only those thirty items and exemplars may only have exposure and affinity entries for those thirty items. The truncated recommendation list may be further compacted as needed for improved response times for the end user's device.
The truncated model sent to the user's mobile device or recommendation list provides a substantial computational advantage in that the full version and the truncated version of the user model do not need to be aligned in response to a user interaction. If a user dismisses a recommendation provided based on the truncated list, the user's interaction may be sent to a server that can perform the computations necessary to adjust or update the user model in real time. In an implementation, a second recommendation list for the first user may be determined. The second recommendation list may be based on user interactions that were not provided for the first recommendation list. Thus the second recommendation list may be based on new or updated user affinity and exposure values. The second recommendation list may be truncated as described above to form a truncated second recommendation list. For example a new user model may be generated based on the updated exposure and affinity values. The updated list of items for which the user has an affinity and exposure may be ranked and a portion thereof may be selected. The truncated second recommendation list may be utilized to update the truncated recommendation list such that the truncated recommendation list matches the truncated second recommendation list. The truncated second recommendation list may replace the truncated recommendation list in some configurations. Thus, the compact user models may be updated in real time to reflect new information about the user's interaction s with exemplars and/or items.
In an implementation, an example of which is provided in
Implementations of the presently disclosed subject matter may be implemented in and used with a variety of component and network architectures.
The bus 21 allows data communication between the central processor 24 and the memory 27, which may include read-only memory (ROM) or flash memory (neither shown), and random access memory (RAM) (not shown), as previously noted. The RAM is generally the main memory into which the operating system and application programs are loaded. The ROM or flash memory can contain, among other code, the Basic Input-Output system (BIOS) which controls basic hardware operation such as the interaction with peripheral components. Applications resident with the computer 20 are generally stored on and accessed via a computer readable medium, such as a hard disk drive (e.g., fixed storage 23), an optical drive, floppy disk, or other storage medium 25.
The fixed storage 23 may be integral with the computer 20 or may be separate and accessed through other interfaces. A network interface 29 may provide a direct connection to a remote server via a telephone link, to the Internet via an internet service provider (ISP), or a direct connection to a remote server via a direct network link to the Internet via a POP (point of presence) or other technique. The network interface 29 may provide such connection using wireless techniques, including digital cellular telephone connection, Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) connection, digital satellite data connection or the like. For example, the network interface 29 may allow the computer to communicate with other computers via one or more local, wide-area, or other networks, as shown in
Many other devices or components (not shown) may be connected in a similar manner (e.g., document scanners, digital cameras and so on). Conversely, all of the components shown in
More generally, various implementations of the presently disclosed subject matter may include or be implemented in the form of computer-implemented processes and apparatuses for practicing those processes. Implementations also may be implemented in the form of a computer program product having computer program code containing instructions implemented in non-transitory and/or tangible media, such as floppy diskettes, CD-ROMs, hard drives, USB (universal serial bus) drives, or any other machine readable storage medium, wherein, when the computer program code is loaded into and executed by a computer, the computer becomes an apparatus for practicing implementations of the disclosed subject matter. Implementations also may be implemented in the form of computer program code, for example, whether stored in a storage medium, loaded into and/or executed by a computer, or transmitted over some transmission medium, such as over electrical wiring or cabling, through fiber optics, or via electromagnetic radiation, wherein when the computer program code is loaded into and executed by a computer, the computer becomes an apparatus for practicing implementations of the disclosed subject matter. When implemented on a general-purpose microprocessor, the computer program code segments configure the microprocessor to create specific logic circuits. In some configurations, a set of computer-readable instructions stored on a computer-readable storage medium may be implemented by a general-purpose processor, which may transform the general-purpose processor or a device containing the general-purpose processor into a special-purpose device configured to implement or carry out the instructions. Implementations may be implemented using hardware that may include a processor, such as a general purpose microprocessor and/or an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) that implements all or part of the techniques according to implementations of the disclosed subject matter in hardware and/or firmware. The processor may be coupled to memory, such as RAM, ROM, flash memory, a hard disk or any other device capable of storing electronic information. The memory may store instructions adapted to be executed by the processor to perform the techniques according to implementations of the disclosed subject matter.
The foregoing description, for purpose of explanation, has been described with reference to specific implementations. However, the illustrative discussions above are not intended to be exhaustive or to limit implementations of the disclosed subject matter to the precise forms disclosed. Many modifications and variations are possible in view of the above teachings. The implementations were chosen and described in order to explain the principles of implementations of the disclosed subject matter and their practical applications, to thereby enable others skilled in the art to utilize those implementations as well as various implementations with various modifications as may be suited to the particular use contemplated.
