Comparison of Three Recent Personalization Algorithms

Personalization algorithms recommend products to users based on their previous interactions with the system. The products could be books, movies, or products in a retail system. The earliest personalization algorithms were based on factorization of the user-item matrix where each entry in the matrix would correspond to an interaction, or absence of an interaction of the user with the product. In this article, we compare three recently developed personalization algorithms. The three algorithms are Bayesian Personalized Ranking, Taxonomy Discovery for Personalized Recommendations and Multi-Matrix Factorization. We compare the three algorithms on the hit rate @ position 10 on a held out test set on 1 million users and 200 thousand items in the catalog of Target Corporation. We report our findings in table 1. We develop all three algorithms on an Apache Spark parallel implementation.