Recommender Systems

In Fashion E-commerce: Finding the Right Fit

Autor / Data

Farfetch
Context

Index

Recommender Systems
What do they do?
Our approach

Big Data Infrastructure

Why do we need it?
Our approach

Introduction
Context
As an e-commerce website, Farfetch main source of revenue is on-line sales.
Due to a great amount of publicity we have many daily visits that do not engage
with the website nor do a purchase.
Our goal with this project is to increase Farfetchs conversion rate, in other words,
convert an ordinary visitor into a buyer by showing items that they will probably
like and develop an infrastruture that can support it.

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Team
About us

Andr
Tavares

Andreia
Santos

Augusto
Fonseca

Christophe
Figueiredo

Filipe
Guedes

Isabel
Portugal

Siemens

Blip

HUF

Farfetch

Johnson &
Johnson

Farfetch

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Recommender Systems
What do they do?
Estimate an utility function that automatically predicts how a user will like an
item based on past behavior, relations to other users, item similarity, context,
Collaborative Filtering: Recommend items based only on the users past behavior.
METHODS

User-based: Find similar users to me and recommend what they liked.

Item-based: Find similar items to those that I have previously liked.

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Recommender Systems
Our Approach

Product Page
interactions

Polarity from
Products Brand
Twitter Sentiment

Product Category

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Product Subcategory

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Recommender Systems
Our Approach
Applied methods:
Random

TPR

Popular
Item based

FPR

User based
For evaluation we also should implement an A/B testing
* With our models we scored best precision results
comparing to Farfetchs current implementation.

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Recommender Systems
Possible Implementation

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Big Data Infrastructure

Why do we need it? Sharing some results
We must be able to present a set of recommendations in a
short amount of time (when users click on a new product page
their recommendations need to be ready).
For solving this we used Spark, an infrastructure known for
its processing speed as it runs in memory (almost 100x
times faster than Hadoop, which writes into disk).
We used ALS (Alternating Least Squares), a pratical
optimization technique when dealing with implicit datasets, and
we were able to do our recommendations in less than 4
seconds!

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Clickstream

Twitter
(Sentiment)

Spark

Recommendation
System

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Some interesting findings

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Some interesting findings

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Further work
What we would like to improve/implement

Study how we can improve our recommendation system in order to achieve

better performance and scalability.

Refine our affinity function (weights, polarity, adding new variables, fading
window). E.g.: Add color and category that are trendy for current season.

Improve user and product clusters performance by adding more relevant

variables.

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Suggestions
How we imagine Farfetch 2.0

Providing a personalized homepage based on the type of user.

Flagging exclusive products so users know that they are buying something
unique.

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