Difference Between User Properties and Events (For User Information)

[Matthew Valenti]

We're using the Universal Recommender Template and have read the documentation a number of times. However, we're still not clear on when to use user properties vs. events (for user information).

Using the example in the documentation to include user device information -- why set device as an event and not a user property?

Note that the documentation is clear on the use of item properties (for boost/filtering).

Thanks!

[Pat Ferrel]

Answers below

> On Mar 13, 2016, at 5:34 PM, Matthew Valenti <mat...@aydus.com> wrote:
>
> We're using the Universal Recommender Template and have read the documentation a number of times. However, we're still not clear on when to use user properties vs. events (for user information).
>
> Using the example in the documentation to include user device information -- why set device as an event and not a user property?
>

1) because they will have multiple devices and you want to compare what they like on each. Think of another example: location. Users have many and may prefer different things in every case. In your case the connection to these user indicators may be static and unchanging like gender but this is a special case and doesn’t fit many other cases. The most general way is as indicators because it fits changing contextual information as well as user preferences and static profile info.
2) because this is just the way we encode it so the math works out

We could allow some user profile information as user properties and we could automatically encode those as usage events. Things like gender will generally have only one value. But they would still need to be treated and indicators (I prefer that term to events).

Also don’t forget that you can modify the code.

[Matthew Valenti]

Thanks for the clarification! Very helpful. So events are included in the prediction engine but user properties are not (but could be by changing the recommendation template code). And that even for device, we might want name, model, version which would require setting 3x distinct events.

[Pat Ferrel]

On Mar 15, 2016, at 7:43 AM, Matthew Valenti <mat...@aydus.com> wrote:

Thanks for the clarification! Very helpful. So events are included in the prediction engine but user properties are not (but could be by changing the recommendation template code). And that even for device, we might want name, model, version which would require setting 3x distinct events.

==== This is probably not necessary you can have any data in a device id so device-id can be name+model+version if you want that degree of granularity.