Recommendations for all : solving thousands of recommendation problems a day

Recommendations are known to be an important part of several online experiences. Outside of media recommendation (music, movies, etc), online retailers have made use of product recommendations to help users make purchases. Product recommendation tends to be really hard because of the twin problems of sparsity and cold-start. Building a recommendation system that performs well in this setting is hard and is generally considered to need some expert tuning. However, all online retailers need to solve this problem well to provide good recommendations. In this paper, we tackle this problem and describe an industrial-scale system called Sigmund where we solve tens of thousands of instances of the recommendation problem as a service for various online retailers. for customers. Sigmund was deployed to production in early 2014 and has been serving thousands of retailers. We describe several design decisions that we made in building Sigmund. We also share some of the lessons we learned from this experience –both from a machine learning perspective and a systems perspective. We hope that these lessons are useful for building future machine-learning services.

• Data Mining and Modeling

• Information Retrieval and the Web