Designing algorithms to recommend items such as news articles & movies to users is a challenging task in numerous web applications The crux of the problem is to rank items based on users' responses to different items to optimize for multiple objectives Major technical challenges are high dimensional prediction with sparse data & constructing high dimensional sequential designs to collect data for user modeling & system design This comprehensive treatment of the statistical issues that arise in recommender systems
Includes:: detailed in-depth discussions of current state-of-the-art methods such as adaptive sequential designs (multi-armed bandit methods) bilinear random-effects models (matrix factorization) & scalable model fitting using modern computing paradigms like Map Reduce The authors draw upon their vast experience working with such large-scale systems at Yahoo! & Linked In & bridge the gap between theory & practice by illustrating complex concepts with examples from applications they are directly involved with