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We are trying to build a recommendation system for a supermarket with diverse item types (ranging from fast-moving grocery to low-moving electronic items). Some items are purchased more frequently in high volume and some items are purchased only once.

We have purchase history data of 4 months from 25K+ customers across 30K+ SKU's from 100+ departments. We ran ALS-WR in Spark to generate recommendations. To our surprise, we are receiving top 15 recommendations for each customer quite generic without much variation.

We have tried several means to diversify the recommendations as below- - computed "rating" = normalized # of purchase - computed "rating" = log of # of purchase - computed "rating" = 1 (if purchase # > 1) - We have used following combination of parameters - lambda = 0.01 to 300, alpha = 5 to 50, rank = 10, 20, 30 and # of iterations = 10, 20 - preference considered is explicit.

Do you think that ALS can be used for such heterogeneous data? If yes, what modifications will make the recommendations diverse & personalized?

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    $\begingroup$ I expect that you get [bread, butter, milk, cereals, eggs and tomatoes] or something relatively similar depending on a country and a region, am I right? $\endgroup$
    – zero323
    Feb 21, 2016 at 13:14
  • $\begingroup$ How did you solve it? $\endgroup$ Jun 8, 2016 at 10:20

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No - alternating least squares (ALS) is not designed for heterogeneous data.

One option for building a recommendation system for heterogeneous data is to bin the items into more common and less common items. Then build a separate model for each of the bins. Then the results will not be dominated by common, generic items. Then a diverse and personalized results page can be created by taking a weighted sample from each of the bins.

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