Yes, you can filter by category if they are attached to items as properties. In 0.6.0, soon to be released, there are inclusion, exclusion, and boosts by any property that can be attached to items. Blacklists are for item-ids only, either items that have gotten certain events or just ids. The business rules are pretty flexible.
BTW if you have small enough data you can run with Postgres + Elasticsearch. Be warned that though I maintain the template I don’t have a lot of experience with Postgres. Something to consider is that moving from most web use cases to machine learning and especially recommenders brings several orders of magnitude more data than you may be used to. On Mar 20, 2017, at 5:58 AM, Kasper Bjerke <[email protected]> wrote: Thank you for a quick response. And thank you for clearing up the unknown/new user issue. In my total lack of imagination I didn't think of passing an empty user parameter. I looked into the blacklisting, is it possible to also use this function to blacklist categories? Say a user already selected an item of a certain category, and now doesn't want to keep getting recommendations in the same category, would I have to pass all categories and exclude the the ones already used? Initially I wanted to use the UR, but the owner did not want to use HBase and Elasticsearch at this point. I'm fairly new to this type of technology, but maybe I will try to learn it and try that out at a later point. Kasper On 20 March 2017 at 13:38, Daniel O' Shaughnessy <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Kasper, The Ecom Recommender (http://predictionio.incubator.apache.org/templates/ecommercerecommendation/quickstart/ <http://predictionio.incubator.apache.org/templates/ecommercerecommendation/quickstart/>) actually does have a basic way to handle unknown/new users, they get recommended generally popular items. I think the Universal Recommender might suit your needs best though. You can find out more about it there : http://actionml.com/docs/ur <http://actionml.com/docs/ur> And yes, AFAIK the blacklist option will simply filter out any items you pass to it. Regards, Daniel. On Mon, 20 Mar 2017 at 10:02 Kasper Bjerke <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hey guys, I'm currently working on a recommender engine for e-commerce. I chose the official E-com Recommender. I have successfully trained and deployed it. And have been testing some simple requests: { "user" : "someUserId", "num" : 5 } etc. and I get some nice responses. Now I was wondering if there's some documentation on the following: - Provide recommendations for users who are not logged in, like first time users who would sign up during the purchase or just people who forgot to sign in before adding items to cart. - And is there a way to pass the existing items in cart as a parameter to get a better recommendation? // is this the blackList Set[ ]? Thank you in advance, Kasper
