Customizing Similar Product template to add boost to favor items

Yangkook Kim

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Mar 23, 2016, 11:46:25 AM3/23/16

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Hi all,

I'm using SimilarProduct template and want to add a functionality to favor some particular items.

Here is an idea.

1. Adding a property called "boost" to Item class

2. Adding the property to ItemScore and query

3. Taking the boost value into the consideration either during training or prediction

I know how to customize the template to do 1 and 2. However, I'm not sure where is the best place to do 3.

Should it be done during the training period? Or should it be during returning prediction? or somewhere else?

Thanks in advance!

Pat Ferrel

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Mar 23, 2016, 6:37:54 PM3/23/16

to Yangkook Kim, predictionio-dev

I think the Universal Recommender does this already. It does SimilarProducts as well a personalized user-based queries and has a fairly flexible method for boosting based on properties.

Yangkook Kim

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Mar 24, 2016, 12:25:06 PM3/24/16

to predictionio-dev, yangk...@gmail.com

Hi Pat,

Thanks for your reply.

> I think the Universal Recommender does this already.

Yes. However, UR is not suitable for me because of the data limitation that I can get from my app, so I need to use SP.

> It does SimilarProducts as well a personalized user-based queries and has a fairly flexible method for boosting based on properties.

Yes, I understood that properties are the best place to add the boost in SP. My question is more like how can I make the boost affect the prediction result so that PIO favor items with higher boost. I suppose this is not implemented in the engine, so I need add code so that prediction takes boost propeties into consideration. However, I'm not sure where is the best place to add the code. Should it be predict() method? Or are there better place to add the modification?