Beyond Collaborative Filtering: The List Recommendation Problem

Most Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are optimized using a dataset of isolated user-item tuples. However, in commercial applications recommended items are usually served as an ordered list of several items and not as isolated items. In this setting, inter-item interactions have an effect on the list’s Click-Through Rate (CTR) that is unaccounted for using traditional CF approaches. Most CF approaches also ignore additional important factors like click propensity variation, item fatigue, etc. In this work, we introduce the list recommendation problem. We present useful insights gleaned from user behavior and consumption patterns from a large scale real world recommender system. We then propose a novel two-layered framework that builds upon existing CF algorithms to optimize a list’s click probability. Our approach accounts for inter-item interactions as well as additional information such as item fatigue, trendiness patterns, contextual information etc. Finally, we evaluate our approach using a novel adaptation of Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) which facilitates off-policy estimation of our method’s CTR and showcases its effectiveness in real-world settings.