How Today's Recommender Systems Use Machine Learning to Cater to Your Every Whim

Whether they recommend products, offers, or content, all recommender systems ultimately determine what makes you more or less compatible with an item or piece of content, according to Julian McAuley, a professor of computer science at University of California San Diego. "More elaborate models leverage machine learning and capture temporal dynamics and changing user context," said McAuley. "But the core idea is the same: they use historical interactions to learn which users and items are similar to each other." They use different approaches to accomplish that. Some recommender systems are content-based systems, examining the properties of different items or pieces of content, explained Dinesh Gauri, Walmart Chair of Marketing at the University of Arkansas.