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Integrating optimized item selection with active learning for continuous exploration in recommender systems

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Abstract

Recommender Systems have become the backbone of personalized services that provide tailored experiences to individual users, yet designing new recommendation applications with limited or no available training data remains a challenge. To address this issue, we focus on selecting the universe of items for experimentation in recommender systems by leveraging a recently introduced combinatorial problem. On the one hand, selecting a large set of items is desirable to increase the diversity of items. On the other hand, a smaller set of items enables rapid experimentation and minimizes the time and the amount of data required to train machine learning models. We first present how to optimize for such conflicting criteria using a multi-level optimization framework. Then, we shift our focus to the operational setting of a recommender system. In practice, to work effectively in a dynamic environment where new items are introduced to the system, we need to explore users’ behaviors and interests continuously. To that end, we show how to integrate the item selection approach with active learning to guide randomized exploration in an ongoing fashion. Our hybrid approach combines techniques from discrete optimization, unsupervised clustering, and latent text embeddings. Experimental results on well-known movie and book recommendation benchmarks demonstrate the benefits of optimized item selection and efficient exploration.

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Availability of data and materials

The dataset used in our experiments are publicly available benchmarks that are commonly used in this line of research. 1. The Goodreads datasets [32, 33] are available at https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/ucsdbookgraph/home. 2. The MovieLens datasets [34] are available at https://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/.

Code Availibility

Most of the work presented in this paper builds on top of open-source libraries. Specifically, the open-source TextWiser library is used for generating item embeddings from text which is available at http://github.com/fidelity/textwiser. Multi-armed bandit recommendation models are built using Mab2Rec which is available at http://github.com/fidelity/mab2rec. The optimization formulations presented in Algorithm 1 is solved using the open-source Python-MIP library, which is available at https://github.com/coin-or/python-mip.

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Funding

No funding was received other than the support of the authors’ employer.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AI Center of Excellence, Fidelity Investments, Boston, USA

    Serdar Kadıoğlu, Bernard Kleynhans & Xin Wang

  2. Dept. Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, USA

    Serdar Kadıoğlu

Authors
  1. Serdar Kadıoğlu
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  2. Bernard Kleynhans
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  3. Xin Wang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the design of the overall algorithm presented in this paper. The initial study conception and the design of the multi-level framework are composed by S.K. which is later extended to the active learning setting by B.K. and X. W.. The preparation of the material, data collection and analysis were performed by B.K. and X. W.. All authors contributed to the write-up of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Serdar Kadıoğlu.

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Kadıoğlu, S., Kleynhans, B. & Wang, X. Integrating optimized item selection with active learning for continuous exploration in recommender systems. Ann Math Artif Intell (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-024-09941-x

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