Feature Extraction: Science or Engineering? – Zalando Tech Blog

Every time our customers visit the Zalando Fashion Store, we want to serve them personalised product recommendations, depending on their preferences. Others love ankle boots, while some prefer sneakers. Whilst some follow the latest trends and others prefer the classic style. In a nutshell, the task of a personalised recommender system involves building user profiles from their behavior and predicting which product recommendations will be most relevant to such profiles. Intuitively, the user profile specifies properties such as how much interest the customer has in sportswear, or whether flat heels are preferred over high heel shoes.