Engineering : Personalization & AI (2)

Best Practices for Recommendation Engines

In this blogpost I will describe how to implement a feature-rich activity feed that will make relevant and accurate personalization algorithms easier to implement. As we have already explored in previous blog posts, app personalization is linking activity feeds and user engagement data. In most cases, a well thought out feed structure provides valuable information
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3 min read

Factorization Machines for Recommendation Systems

As a Data Scientist that works on Feed Personalization, I find it it important to stay up to date with the current state of Machine Learning and its applications. Most of the time, using some of the better-known recommendation algorithms yields good initial results; however, sometimes a change in the model is essential to provide customers
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6 min read

Example Ranking Methods for Your Feeds

In this short tutorial we will show you how to use Custom Ranking for your activity streams and news feeds. By default all feeds on Stream are ranked chronologically. Custom ranking allows you to take full control over how your feeds are sorted. Some common use cases include: Showing popular activities higher in the feed
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4 min read

Personalization & Machine Learning for News Feeds and Social Networks

Winds is an open source RSS reader is powered by React, Redux, Sails and Stream. This tutorial explains how we’ve built personalization for Winds, as an example of how using Stream makes it easy to build personalized feeds. About Personalization Personalization is a very broad concept. In this case, personalization equates to leveraging engagement data
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5 min read

An Introduction to Contextual Bandits

In this post I discuss the Multi Armed Bandit problem and its applications to feed personalization. First, I will use a simple synthetic example to visualize arm selection in with bandit algorithms, I also evaluate the performance of some of the best known algorithms on a dataset for musical genre recommendations. What is a Multi-Armed Bandit? Imagine
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6 min read

Fast Recommendations for Activity Streams Using Vowpal Wabbit

The problem of content discovery and recommendation is very common in many machine learning applications: social networks, news aggregators and search engines are constantly updating and tweaking their algorithms to give individual users a unique experience. Personalization engines suggest relevant content with the objective of maximizing a specific metric. For example: a news website might want to increase
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5 min read