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C HA P T E R 15
Case Study of
Mobile Application
Recommendations
W
ith the rapid growth of smartphones over the past five years, a
new market for smartphone applications has emerged and with
it stiff competition for mind share. All vendors in this space de-
sire the ability to make recommendations on the applications (apps)
that users will like. The goal is to ensure that recommendations are
not seen as spam (unwanted solicitations) but instead as great advice,
thus moving from simply suggesting content to a highly prized role as
a trusted advisor. The business problem in this case is very straight-
forward: Given the apps users have on their mobile phones, what apps
are they likely to use? This problem poses several challenges, the first
being the size of the data. With hundreds of millions of cell phone
users and each one being almost unique in app purchases, finding
good recommendations is difficult. The other issue is the level of detail
about the apps. For this business challenge, the data was a set of bi-
nary variables. The binary state could be defined a number of different
ways: Did they have the application installed? Had they ever used the
application? Had the application been used in the last time period?
225
226 BIG DATA, DATA MINING, AND MACHINE LEARNING
produce powerful and stable models. The models were evaluated against
a holdout sample that had been partitioned earliernot randomly,
as is typical, but by a time window. To randomly sample would have
biased the recommendations because users were in both training and
validation data, but with a time partition the model could be tested
under realworld conditions, because once the model is developed
and deployed, it must be updated with an active learning paradigm or
retrained before excessive decay.