Subject talks: Recommender systems

As part of the subject talks in computing programme organised by Rashmi Dravid, a recent talkby Dr Iqbal Adjali (Mathematics & Informatics Expertise Team Leader Unilever R&D Discover) looked at Personalisation Algorithms for Grocery Recommender Systems. 

This informative (and interesting) talk  introduced some of the concepts involved in developing personalisation algorithms for the grocery retail sector, and discussed wider aspects such as the business challenges that have or are likely to be addressed.

  

The talk used the work of Unilever's  Mathematics & Informatics group to illustrate how recommender system work. This group has been investigating various personalisation algorithms, in order to understand how their performance varies according to different data sets and application scenarios. The work of the group was illustrated by examples, the group has been working on, including the Swiss online supermarket LeShop (www.LeShop.ch), in analysing individual shopping basket (cf. loyalty card) data. As part of this collaboration, an on-line personalised retail recommender systems was developed, which also serve as a test-bed to evaluate the performance of their personalisation algorithms.