Title: Algorithms and Architecture for Real-time Recommendations at News UK,
Abstract: Recommendation systems are recognised as being hugely important in industry,
and the area is now well understood. At News UK, there is a requirement to be
able to quickly generate recommendations for users on news items as they are
published. However, little has been published about systems that can generate
recommendations in response to changes in recommendable items and user
behaviour in a very short space of time. In this paper we describe a new
algorithm for updating collaborative filtering models incrementally, and
demonstrate its effectiveness on clickstream data from The Times. We also
describe the architecture that allows recommendations to be generated on the
fly, and how we have made each component scalable. The system is currently
being used in production at News UK.