Abstract: 

Recommendation systems (RecSys) are the core engine for any personalized experience on eCommerce and online media websites. Most of the companies leverage RecSys to increase user interaction, to enrich shopping potential and to generate upsell & cross-sell opportunities. Amazon uses recommendations as a targeted marketing tool throughout its website that contributes 35% of its total revenue generation [1]. Netflix users watch ~75% of the recommended content and artwork [2]. Spotify employs a recommendation system to update personal playlists every week so that users won’t miss newly released music by artists they like. This has helped Spotify to increase its number of monthly users from 75 million to 100 million at a time [3]. YouTube's personalized recommendation helps users to find relevant videos quickly and easily which account for around 60% of video clicks from the homepage [4].

In general, RecSys generates recommendations based on user browsing history and preferences, past purchases, and item metadata. It turns out most existing recommendation systems are based on three paradigms: collaborative filtering (CF) and its variants, content-based recommendation engines, and hybrid recommendation engines that combine content-based and CF or exploit more information about users in the content-based recommendation. However, they suffer from limitations like rapidly changing user data, user preferences, static recommendations, grey sheep, cold start, and malicious user.

Classical RecSys algorithm like content-based recommendation performs great on item to item similarities but will only recommend items related to one category and may not recommend anything in other categories as the user never viewed those items before. Collaborative filtering solves this problem by exploiting the user's behavior and preferences over the items in recommending items to the new users. However, collaborative filtering suffers from a few drawbacks like cold start, popularity bias, and sparsity. The classical recommendation models consider the recommendation as a static process. We can solve the static recommendation on rapidly changing user data by RL. RL based RecSys captures the user’s temporal intentions and responds promptly. However, as the user action and items matrix size increases, it becomes difficult to provide recommendations using RL. Deep RL based solutions like actor-critic and deep Q-networks overcome all the aforementioned drawbacks.

Present systems suffer from two limitations, firstly considering the recommendation as a static procedure and ignoring the dynamic interactive nature between users and the recommender systems. Also, most of the works focus on the immediate feedback of recommended items and neglecting the long-term rewards based on reinforcement learning. We propose a recommendation system that uses the Q-learning method. We use ε-greedy policy combined with Q learning, a powerful method of reinforcement learning that handles those issues proficiently and gives the customer more chance to explore new pages or new products that are not so popular. Usually while implementing Reinforcement Learning (RL) to real-world problems both the state space and the action space are very vast. Therefore, to address the aforementioned challenges, we propose the multiple/distributed Q table approaches which can deal with large state-action space and that aides in actualizing the Q learning algorithm in the recommendation and huge state-action space.

Bio: 

Ravi Ranjan is working as Senior Data Scientist at Publicis Sapient. He is part of the Centre of Excellence and responsible for building a machine learning model at scale. He has worked on multiple engagements with clients mainly from Automobile, Banking, Retail, and Insurance industry across geographies.
In the current role, he is working on a Hyper-personalized recommendation system for the Automobile industry focused on Machine Learning, Deep learning, Realtime data processing on large scale data using MLflow and Kubeflow. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a proficiency course in Reinforcement Learning from IISc, Bangalore.