Luuk Kaandorp, Vincent Peijnenburg - The Power of the Bonus Card: Road to Personalised Search

Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain of the Netherlands, has a loyalty program, called the Bonus Card, allowing us to tie all purchased products to a customer whenever they scan the card, either in the store or online. This creates a huge potential for personalisation, which had previously not been utilised within product search. We will present about our journey going from popularity-based search for the broader customer base, to a tailored search experience for all of our unique customers using the information we gather from the Bonus Card. Specifically, we will focus on Learning-to-Rank (LTR). This transition was definitely not without it's challenges, on which we would love to share our experience:
Handling large quantities of data. Going from aggregated popularity to single user relevancy meant a million-fold increase in the quantities of data that we were handling.
Handling large amounts of point-in-time accurate features in offline feature stores.
Using distributed computing to train a model on this large quantity of data.
Redefining the concept of relevancy. How can we incorporate profitability?
Handling position bias in our data.
Using Kafka to facilitate the quick transfer of offline features to online features during inference.

This presentation is relevant for anyone who is struggling to go from legacy popularity-based search to personalised search for big customer bases.

You will learn how to face the challenges of moving to large quantities of personalized data, distributing a model to learn on this exploded quantity of data, and redefining the concept of relevancy.

Speakers: Luuk Kaandorp, Vincent Peijnenburg

More: https://2024.berlinbuzzwords.de/sessi...

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