Title: Building Personalized Recommender Systems using Photon ML

Abstract: Recommendation systems have become ubiquitous for web applications. Given significant heterogeneity in user preference, providing personalized recommendations is key to the success of such systems. To achieve this goal at scale, using machine learned models to estimate user preference from user feedback data is essential. Providing an easy-to-use and flexible machine learning library for practitioners to build personalization models is the key to productivity, agility, and developer happiness. We have developed a hands-on tutorial on personalizing recommender systems. In this tutorial, we first give an overview of the components required for building an end-to-end web recommender system and then focus on how to usePhoton ML (LinkedIn’s open-sourced machine learning library) to train recommendation models and serve the results to users. Participants will get hands-on experience in training models of different levels of granularity to improve model performance and perform the “modeling loop” consisting of training a model, scoring candidate items using the model, seeing recommended items in a web UI, giving feedback to a number of recommended items, and then training a model again using the newly generated feedback.