Eventbrite talk at SXSW interactive 2013. The talk is about recommendation systems. The talk goes in details of what, why, how and future of recommendation systems.
2. Eventbrite by the Numbers
1.5 million events
80 million tickets sold
$1 billion in gross ticket sales
Events in 179 countries
3. Who am I?
Director of Data Engineering
Studied computer science
Machine Learning, Analytics and Big Data
Spam Detection, Consumer Data
Mining, Infrastructure
linkedin.com/in/vipulsharma3
@vipulsharma
vipul@eventbrite.com
4. Post Event Creation
Event Lifecycle
Organization Discovery
Sale
6. Recommendation - What?
• Mechanism to match users with their needs
• Ecommerce – what users should buy.
• Content – what users should browse.
• Amazon – Product suggestions
• Netflix – Movie suggestions
•Facebook – Newsfeed
• LinkedIn – People you many know
• Eventbrite – Event Picks for you
7. Recommendations - Why?
• User Acquisition
• Bring users to your service
• Build long-term trust
• Happy customers are happy advertisers
• User Engagement
• Engage users with strategic placements
• Build site navigation with various funnels
• Expose more inventory to users
• Conversion
• Upsell
• Convert less popular inventory
• Example Attendee Newsletter
8. Recommendations – How?
Interest
Social Graph Graph
Your friends like Your friends
Collaborative Lady Gaga so who share
Filtering – Item- you will like your interest
Item Similarity Lady Gaga in music, tech
You like Godfather (Facebook, Linke and movies
Collaborative so you will like dIn)
Filtering – User-
Scarface (Netflix) are attending
User Similarity
People who bought SXSW
a camera also (Eventbrite)
bought batteries
Item Hierarchy
(Amazon)
You bought a
camera so you
need batteries
(Amazon)
9. Reason of Progression?
• User data vs Item data
• It was hard to collect user meta data vs item meta
data
• Items < Users
• Items are less dynamic than users
• Technology Changes
• Social graphs
• Big Data
• Cloud
• Crowd Sourcing
10. Why Social Graph is not Enough
• Events are social
• Events reflect your interests
• Social graphs are dense
• Interests shift while your graph doesn’t
11. Determining User Interests
• Ask Users
• Keep it frictionless
• Explain the benefits
• Learn from User Activity
• What they bought, browsed, etc
• Maintain a consistent taxonomy
• Ask publisher
• Use mathematical models
• Use crowd sourcing
• Use Facebook
• Make sure your taxonomy maps with FB intrest data
12. Social Graphs
• Implicit Graph - Activity
• Connections based on activity
• Interests trump relationships
• We all create an interest graph
• Explicit Graph - Friends
• Friends who do not share your interests
• Implicit graph is more active than explicit
• Explicit graph does not change with your interests
• Mixed – Activity with Friends
• Most powerful
15. Who is similar to me?...
Who is more similar to me?
• A two-step process: Identify clusters (via social graph); use the
interest graph to rank recommendations within that cluster
• Is a user more similar to one person in his graph or another?
• Preferences of the most similar connection will be ranked highest
• Clustering applies detailed data from a single user to a group of
users who are similar
• This eliminates the need to ask each user in that group for detailed data
•Building a Social Graph does the clustering for you
• Users do most of the work
• They self-select into accurate clusters
•Modeling is another option
• Models require that you collect learning data from users– but this
creates friction
• Who is more similar to me?
•Recommendation is a Ranking Problem
16. Put it all together
Item Taxonomy
User Interest
User Graph/Interest Graph
Ranking
Recommendations
18. Future – Content Discovery
Search
• Excellent ability to match user queries with content
• Limited understanding of each individual user
• Limited understanding of user graph
• People place the most trust in content and
recommendations generated by friends
• The social graph will improve search
Reviews
• Lack personalization
• Trust on Internet < Trust of friends
19. Future – Content Discovery
Entry Point
• More recommendation-based funnels
• More interconnected funnels
• Friends’ suggestions, similar items, editorial
picks, popular among similar users, etc
Recommendation Systems
• More relevant, with more user data
• Finer graphs
20. Questions?
See it in action. Download our app:
eventbrite.com/eventbriteapp