Tag: Deep learning

Building Self Learning Recommendation system – IV : Prototype Phase I: Segmenting the customers.

This is the fourth post of our series on building a self learning recommendation system using reinforcement learning. In the coming posts of the series we will expand on our understanding of the reinforcement learning problem and build an application for recommending products. These are the different posts of the series where we will progressively build our recommendation system.

  1. Recommendation system and reinforcement learning primer
  2. Introduction to multi armed bandit problem
  3. Self learning recommendation system as a K-armed bandit
  4. Build the prototype of the self learning recommendation system: Part I ( This post )
  5. Build the prototype of the self learning recommendation system: Part II
  6. Productionising the self learning recommendation system: Part I – Customer Segmentation
  7. Productionising the self learning recommendation system: Part II – Implementing self learning recommendation
  8. Evaluating different deployment options for the self learning recommendation systems.

Introduction

In the last post of the series we formulated the idea on how we can build the self learning recommendation system as a K armed bandit. In this post we will go ahead and start building the prototype of our self learning system based on the idea we developed. We will be using Jupyter notebook to build our prototype. Let us dive in

Processes for building our self learning recommendation system

Let us take a birds eye view of the recommendation system we are going to build. We will implement the following processes

  1. Cleaning of the data set
  2. Segment the customers using RFM segmentation
  3. Creation of states for contextual recommendation
  4. Creation of reward and value distributions
  5. Implement the self learning process using simple averaging method
  6. Simulate customer actions to initiate self learning for recommendations

The first two processes will be implemented in this post and the remaining processes will be covered in the next post.

Cleaning the data set

The data set which we would be using for this exercise would be the online retail data set. Let us load the data set in our system and get familiar with the data. First let us import all the necessary library files

from pickle import load
from pickle import dump
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from dateutil.parser import parse
import os
from collections import Counter
import operator
from random import sample

We will now define a simple function to load the data using pandas. 

def dataLoader(orderPath):
    # THis is the method to load data from the input files    
    orders = pd.read_csv(orderPath,encoding = "ISO-8859-1")
    return orders

The above function reads the csv file and returns the data frame. Let us use this function to load the data and view the head of the data

# Please define your specific path where the data set is loaded
filename = "OnlineRetail.csv"
# Let us load the customer Details
custDetails = dataLoader(filename)
custDetails.head()
Figure 1 : Retail data set

Further in the exercise we have to work a lot with the dates and therefore we need to extract relevant details from the date column like the day, weekday, month, year etc. We will do that with the date parser library. Let us now parse all the date related column and create new columns storing the new details we extract after parsing the dates.

#Parsing  the date
custDetails['Parse_date'] = custDetails["InvoiceDate"].apply(lambda x: parse(x))
# Parsing the weekdaty
custDetails['Weekday'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.weekday())
# Parsing the Day
custDetails['Day'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime("%A"))
# Parsing the Month
custDetails['Month'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime("%B"))
# Extracting the year
custDetails['Year'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime("%Y"))
# Combining year and month together as one feature
custDetails['year_month'] = custDetails['Year'] + "_" +custDetails['Month']

custDetails.head()
Figure 2 : Data frame after date parsing

As seen from line 22 we have used the lambda() function to first parse the ‘date’ column. The parsed date is stored in a new column called ‘Parse_date’. After parsing the dates first, we carry out different operations, again using the lambda() function on the parsed date. The different operations we carry out are

  1. Extract weekday and store it in a new column called ‘Weekday’ : line 24
  2. Extract the day of the week and store it in the column ‘Day’ : line 26
  3. Extract the month and store in the column ‘Month’ : line 28
  4. Extract year and store in the column ‘Year’ : line 30

Finally, in line 32 we combine the year and month to form a new column called ‘year_month’. This is done to enable easy filtering of data based on the combination of a year and month.

We will also create a column which gives you the gross value of each puchase. Gross value can be calculated by multiplying the quantity with unit price. 

# Creating gross value column
custDetails['grossValue'] = custDetails["Quantity"] * custDetails["UnitPrice"]
custDetails.head()
Figure 3 :Customer Details Data frame

The reason we are calculating the gross value is to use it for segmentation of customers which will be dealt with in the next section. This takes us to the end of the initial preparation of the data set. Next we start creating customer segments.

Creating Customer Segments

In the last post, where we formulated the problem statement, we identified that customer segment could be one of the important components of the states. In addition to the customer segment,the other components are day of purchase and period of the month. So our next endeavour is to prepare data to create the different states we require. We will start with defining the customer segment.

There are different approaches to creating customer segments. In this post we will use the RFM analysis to create customer segments. Let us get going with creation of customer segments from our data set. We will continue on the same notebook we were using so far.

import lifetimes

In line 39,We import the lifetimes package to create the RFM data from our transactional dataset. Next we will use the package to convert the transaction data to the specific format.

# Converting data to RFM format
RfmAgeTrain = lifetimes.utils.summary_data_from_transaction_data(custDetails, 'CustomerID', 'Parse_date', 'grossValue')
RfmAgeTrain

The process for getting the frequency, recency and monetary value is very simple using the life time package as shown in line 42 . From the output we can see the RFM data frame formed with each customer ID as individual row. For each of the customer, the frequency and recency in days is represented along with the average monetary value for the customer. We will be using these values for creating clusters of customer segments.

Before we work further, let us clean the data frame a bit by resetting the index values as shown in line 44

RfmAgeTrain = RfmAgeTrain.reset_index()
RfmAgeTrain

What we will now do is to use recency, frequency and monetary values seperately to create clusters. We will use the K-means clustering technique to find the number of clusters required. Many parts of the code used for clustering is taken from the following post on customer segmentation.

In lines 46-47 we import the Kmeans clustering method and matplotlib library.

from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

For the purpose of getting the recency matrix let us take a subset of the data frame with only customer ID and recency value as shown in lines 48-49

user_recency = RfmAgeTrain[['CustomerID','recency']]
user_recency.head()

In any clustering problem,as you might know, one of the critical tasks is to determine the number of clusters which in the Kmeans algorithm is a parameter. We will use the well known elbow method to find the optimum number of clusters.

# Initialize a dictionary to store sum of squared error
sse = {}
recency = user_recency[['recency']]

# Loop through different cluster combinations
for k in range(1,10):
    # Fit the Kmeans model using the iterated cluster value
    kmeans = KMeans(n_clusters=k,max_iter=2000).fit(recency)
    # Store the cluster against the sum of squared error for each cluster formation   
    sse[k] = kmeans.inertia_
    
# Plotting all the clusters
plt.figure()
plt.plot(list(sse.keys()),list(sse.values()))
plt.xlabel("Number of clusters")
plt.show()
Figure 4 : Plot of number of clusters

In line 51, we initialise a dictionary to store the sum of square error for each k-means cluster and then subset the data frame ‘recency’ with only the recency values in line 52.

From line 55, we start a loop to itrate through different cluster values. For each cluster value, we fit the k-means model in line 57. We also store the sum of squared error in line 59 for each of the cluster in the dictionary we initialized.

Lines 62-65, we visualise the number of clusters against the sum of squared error, which gives and indication of the right k value to choose.

From the plot we can see that 2,3 and 4 cluster values are where the elbow tapers and one of these values can be taken as the cluster value.Let us choose 4 clusters for our purpose and then refit the data.

# let us take four clusters 
kmeans = KMeans(n_clusters=4)
# Fit the model on the recency data
kmeans.fit(user_recency[['recency']])
# Predict the clusters for each of the customer
user_recency['RecencyCluster'] = kmeans.predict(user_recency[['recency']])
user_recency

In line 67, we instantiate the KMeans class using 4 clusters. We then use the fit method on the recency values in line 69. Once the model is fit, we predict the cluster for each customer in line 71.

From the output we can see that the recency cluster is predicted against each customer ID. We will clean up this data frame a bit, by resetting the index.

user_recency.sort_values(by='recency',ascending=False).reset_index(drop=True)

From the output we can see that the data is ordered according to the clusters. Let us also look at how the clusters are mapped vis a vis the actual recency value. For doing this, we will group the data with respect to each cluster and then find the mean of the recency value, as in line 74. 

user_recency.groupby('RecencyCluster')['recency'].mean().reset_index()

From the output we see the mean value of recency for each cluster. We can clearly see that there is a demarcation of the mean values with the value of the cluster. However, the mean values are not mapped in a logical (increasing or decreasing) order of the clusters. From the output we can see that cluster 3 is mapped to the smallest recency value ( 7.72). The next smallest value (115.85) is mapped to cluster 0 and so on. So there is not specific ordering to the custer and the mean value mapping. This might be a problem when we combine all the clusters for recency, frequency and monetary together to derive a combined score. So it is necessary to sort it in an ordered fashion. We will use a custom function to get the order right. Let us see the function.

# Function for ordering cluster numbers

def order_cluster(cluster_field_name,target_field_name,data,ascending):    
    # Group the data on the clusters and summarise the target field(recency/frequency/monetary) based on the mean value
    data_new = data.groupby(cluster_field_name)[target_field_name].mean().reset_index()
    # Sort the data based on the values of the target field
    data_new = data_new.sort_values(by=target_field_name,ascending=ascending).reset_index(drop=True)
    # Create a new column called index for storing the sorted index values
    data_new['index'] = data_new.index
    # Merge the summarised data onto the original data set so that the index is mapped to the cluster
    data_final = pd.merge(data,data_new[[cluster_field_name,'index']],on=cluster_field_name)
    # From the final data drop the cluster name as the index is the new cluster
    data_final = data_final.drop([cluster_field_name],axis=1)
    # Rename the index column to cluster name
    data_final = data_final.rename(columns={'index':cluster_field_name})
    return data_final

In line 77, we define the function and its inputs. Let us look at the inputs to the function

cluster_field_name : This is the field name we give to the cluster in the data set like “RecencyCluster”.

target_field_name : This is the field pertaining to our target values like ‘recency’ , ‘frequency’ and ,’monetary_values’.

data : This is the data frame containing the cluster information and target values, for eg ( user_recency)

ascending : This is a flag indicating whether the data has to be sorted in ascending order or not

Line 79, we group the data based on the cluster and summarise the data under each group to get the mean of the target variable. The idea is to sort the data frame based on the mean values in ascending order which is done in line 81. Once the data is sorted in ascending order, we form a new feature with the data frame index as its values, in line 83. Now the index values will act as sorted cluster values and we will get a mapping between the existing cluster values and the new cluster values which are sorted. In line 85, we merge the summarised data frame with the original data frame so that the new cluster values are mapped to all the values in the data frame. Once the new sorted cluster labels are mapped to the original data frame, the old cluster labels are dropped in line 87 and the column renamed in line 89

Now that we have defined the function, let us implement it and sort the data frame in a logical order in line 91.

user_recency = order_cluster('RecencyCluster','recency',user_recency,False)

Next we will summarise the new sorted data frame and check if the clusters and mapped in a logical order.

user_recency.groupby('RecencyCluster')['recency'].mean().reset_index()

From the above output we can see that the cluster numbers are mapped in a logical order of decreasing recency.
We now need to repeat the process for frequency and monetary values. For convenience we will wrap all these processes in a new function.

def clusterSorter(target_field_name,ascending):    
    # Make the subset data frame using the required feature
    user_variable = RfmAgeTrain[['CustomerID',target_field_name]]
    # let us take four clusters indicating 4 quadrants
    kmeans = KMeans(n_clusters=4)
    kmeans.fit(user_variable[[target_field_name]])
    # Create the cluster field name from the target field name
    cluster_field_name = target_field_name + 'Cluster'
    # Create the clusters
    user_variable[cluster_field_name] = kmeans.predict(user_variable[[target_field_name]])
    # Sort and reset index
    user_variable.sort_values(by=target_field_name,ascending=ascending).reset_index(drop=True)
    # Sort the data frame according to cluster values
    user_variable = order_cluster(cluster_field_name,target_field_name,user_variable,ascending)
    return user_variable

Let us now implement this function to get the clusters for frequency and monetary values.

# Implementing for user frequency
user_freqency = clusterSorter('frequency',True)
user_freqency.groupby('frequencyCluster')['frequency'].mean().reset_index()

# Implementing for monetary values
user_monetary = clusterSorter('monetary_value',True)
user_monetary.groupby('monetary_valueCluster')['monetary_value'].mean().reset_index()

Let us now sit back and look at the three results which we got and try to analyse the results. For recency, we implemented the process using ‘ascending’ value as ‘False’ and the other two with ascending value as ‘True’. Why do you think we did it this way ?

To answer let us look these three variables from the perspective of the desirable behaviour from a customer. We would want customers who are very recent, are very frequent and spent lot of money. So from a recency perspective lesser days is a good behaviour as this indicate very recent customers. The reverse is true for frequency and monetary where the more of those values is the desirable behaviour. This is why we used 'ascending = false' in the recency variable as the clusters would be sorted with the less frequent ( more days) for cluster ‘0’ and the mean days comes down when we go to cluster 3. So in effect we are making cluster 3 as the group of most desirable customers. The reverse applies to frequency and monetary value where we gave 'ascending = True' to make custer 3 as the group of most desirable customers.

Now that we have obtained the clusters for each of the variables seperately, its time to combine them into one data frame and then get a consolidated score which will become the segments we want.

Let us first combine each of the individual dataframes we created with the original data frame

# Merging the individual data frames with the main data frame
RfmAgeTrain = pd.merge(RfmAgeTrain,user_monetary[["CustomerID",'monetary_valueCluster']],on='CustomerID')
RfmAgeTrain = pd.merge(RfmAgeTrain,user_freqency[["CustomerID",'frequencyCluster']],on='CustomerID')
RfmAgeTrain = pd.merge(RfmAgeTrain,user_recency[["CustomerID",'RecencyCluster']],on='CustomerID')
RfmAgeTrain.head()

In lines 115-117, we combine the individual dataframes to our main dataframe. We combine them on the ‘CustomerID’ field. After combining we have a consolidated data frame with each individual cluster label mapped to each customer id as shown below

Let us now add the individual cluster labels to get a combined cluster score.

# Calculate the overall score
RfmAgeTrain['OverallScore'] = RfmAgeTrain['RecencyCluster'] + RfmAgeTrain['frequencyCluster'] + RfmAgeTrain['monetary_valueCluster']
RfmAgeTrain

Let us group the data based on the ‘OverallScore’ and find the mean values of each of our variables , recency, frequency and monetary.

RfmAgeTrain.groupby('OverallScore')['frequency','recency','monetary_value'].mean().reset_index()

From the output we can see how the distributions of the new clusters are. From the values we can see that there is some level of logical demarcation according to the cluster labels. The higher cluster labels ( 4,5 & 6) have high monetary values, high frequency levels and also mid level recency levels. The first two clusters ( 0 & 1) have lower monetary values, high recency and low levels of frequency. Another stand out cluster is cluster 3, which has the lowest monetary value, lowest frequency and the lowest recency. We can very well go with these six clusters or we can combine clusters who demonstrate similar trends/behaviours. However this assessment needs to be taken based on the number of customers we have under each of these new clusters. Let us get those numbers first.

RfmAgeTrain.groupby('OverallScore')['frequency'].count().reset_index()

From the counts, we can see that the higher scores ( 4,5,6) have very few customers relative to the other clusters. So it would make sense to combine them to one single segment. As these clusters have higher values we will make them customer segment ‘Q4’. Cluster 3 has some of the lowest relative scores and so we will make it segment ‘Q1’. We can also combine clusters 0 & 1 to a single segment as the number of customers for those two clusters are also lower and make it segment ‘Q2’. Finally cluster 2 would be segment ‘Q3’ . Lets implement these steps next.

RfmAgeTrain['Segment'] = 'Q1'
RfmAgeTrain.loc[(RfmAgeTrain.OverallScore == 0) ,'Segment']='Q2'
RfmAgeTrain.loc[(RfmAgeTrain.OverallScore == 1),'Segment']='Q2'
RfmAgeTrain.loc[(RfmAgeTrain.OverallScore == 2),'Segment']='Q3'
RfmAgeTrain.loc[(RfmAgeTrain.OverallScore == 4),'Segment']='Q4'
RfmAgeTrain.loc[(RfmAgeTrain.OverallScore == 5),'Segment']='Q4'
RfmAgeTrain.loc[(RfmAgeTrain.OverallScore == 6),'Segment']='Q4'

RfmAgeTrain

After allocating the clusters to the respective segments, the subsequent data frame will look as above. Let us now take the mean values of each of these segments to understand how the segment values are distributed.

RfmAgeTrain.groupby('Segment')['frequency','recency','monetary_value'].mean().reset_index()

From the output we can see that for each customer segment the monetary value and frequency values are in ascending order. The value of recency is not ordered in any fashion. However that dosent matter as all what we are interested in getting is the segmentation of the customer data into four segments. Finally let us merge the segment information to the orginal customer transaction data.

# Merging the customer details with the segment
custDetails = pd.merge(custDetails, RfmAgeTrain, on=['CustomerID'], how='left')
custDetails.head()

The above output is just part of the final dataframe. From the output we can see that the segment data is updated to the original data frame.

With that we complete the first step of our process. Let us summarise what we have achieved so far.

  • Preprocessed data to extract information required to generate states
  • Transformed data to the RFM format.
  • Clustered data with respect to recency, frequency and monetary values and then generated the composite score.
  • Derived 4 segments based on the cluster data.

Having completed the segmentation of customers, we are all set to embark on the most important processes.

What Next ?

The next step is to take the segmentation information and then construct our states and action strategies from them. This will be dealt with in the next post. Let us take a peek into the processes we will implement in the next post.

  1. Create states and actions from the customer segments we just created
  2. Initialise the value distribution and rewards distribution
  3. Build the self learning recommendaton system using the epsilon greedy method
  4. Simulate customer action to get the feed backs
  5. Update the value distribution based on customer feedback and improve recommendations

There is lot of ground which will be covered in the next post.Please subscribe to this blog post to get notifications when the next post is published.

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The complete code base for the series is in the Bayesian Quest Git hub repository

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Building Self Learning Recommendation system – III : Recommendation System as a K-armed Bandit

This is the third post of our series on building a self learning recommendation system using reinforcement learning. This series consists of 8 posts where in we progressively build a self learning recommendation system.

  1. Recommendation system and reinforcement learning primer
  2. Introduction to multi armed bandit problem
  3. Self learning recommendation system as a K-armed bandit ( This post )
  4. Build the prototype of the self learning recommendation system: Part I
  5. Build the prototype of the self learning recommendation system: Part II
  6. Productionising the self learning recommendation system: Part I – Customer Segmentation
  7. Productionising the self learning recommendation system: Part II – Implementing self learning recommendation
  8. Evaluating different deployment options for the self learning recommendation systems.

Introduction

In our previous post we implemented couple of experiments with K-armed bandit. When we discussed the idea of the K-armed bandits from the context of recommendation systems, we briefly touched upon the idea that the buying behavior of a customer depends on the customers context. In this post we will take the idea of the context forward and how the context will be used to build the recommendation system using the K-armed bandit solution.

Defining the context for customer buying

When we discussed about reinforcement learning in our first post, we learned about the elements of a reinforcement learning setting like state, actions, rewards etc. Let us now identify these elements in the context of the recommendation system we are building.

State

When we discussed about reinforcement learning in the first post, we learned that when an agent interacts with the environment at each time step, the agent manifests a certain state. In the example of the robot picking trash the different states were that of high charge or low charge. However in the context of the recommendation system, what would be our states ? Let us try to derive the states from the context of a customer who makes an online purchase. What would be those influencing factors which defines the product the customer buys ? Some of these are

  • The segment the customer belongs
  • The season or time of year the purchase is made
  • The day in which purchase is made

There could be many other influencing factors other than this. For simplicity let us restrict to these factors for now. A state could be made from the combinations of all these factors. Let us arrive at these factors through some exploratory analysis of the data

The data set we would be using is the online retail data set available in the UCI Machine learning library. We will download the data and the place it in local folder and the read the file from the local folder. 

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
from dateutil.parser import parse

Lines 1-3 imports all the necessary packages for our purpose. Let us now load the data as a pandas data frame

# Please use the path to the actual data
filename = "data/Online Retail.xlsx"
# Let us load the customer Details
custDetails = pd.read_excel(filename, engine='openpyxl')
custDetails.head()
Figure 1: Head of the retail data set

In line 5, we load the data from disk and then read the excel shee using the ‘openpyxl’ engine. Please note to pip install the ‘openpyxl’ package if not available.

Let us now parse the date column using date parser and extract information from the date column.

#Parsing  the date
custDetails['Parse_date'] = custDetails["InvoiceDate"].apply(lambda x: parse(str(x)))
# Parsing the weekdaty
custDetails['Weekday'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.weekday())
# Parsing the Day
custDetails['Day'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime("%A"))
# Parsing the Month
custDetails['Month'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime("%B"))
# Getting the year
custDetails['Year'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime("%Y"))
# Getting year and month together as one feature
custDetails['year_month'] = custDetails['Year'] + "_" +custDetails['Month']
# Feature engineering of the customer details data frame
# Get the date  as a seperate column
custDetails['Date'] = custDetails['Parse_date'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime("%d"))
# Converting date to float for easy comparison
custDetails['Date']  = custDetails['Date'] .astype('float64')
# Get the period of month column
custDetails['monthPeriod'] = custDetails['Date'].apply(lambda x: int(x > 15))

custDetails.head()
Figure 2 : Parsed Data

As seen from line 11 we have used the lambda() function to first parse the ‘date’ column. The parsed date is stored in a new column called ‘Parse_date’. After parsing the dates first, we carry out different operations, again using the lambda() function on the parsed date. The different operations we carry out are

  1. Extract weekday and store it in a new column called ‘Weekday’ : line 13
  2. Extract the day of the week and store it in the column ‘Day’ : line 15
  3. Extract the month and store in the column ‘Month’ : line 17
  4. Extract year and store in the column ‘Year’ : line 19

In line 21 we combine the year and month to form a new column called ‘year_month’. This is done to enable easy filtering of data, based on the combination of a year and month.

We make some more changes from line 24-28. In line 24, we extract the date of the month and then convert it into a float type in line 26. The purpose of taking the date is to find out which of these transactions have happened before 15th of the month and which after 15th. We extract those details in line 28, where we create a binary points ( 0 & 1) as to whether a date falls in the last 15 days or the first 15 days of the month.

We will also create a column which gives you the gross value of each puchase. Gross value can be calculated by multiplying the quantity with unit price. After that we will consolidate the data for each unique invoice number and then explore some of the elements of states which we want to explore

# Creating gross value column
custDetails['grossValue'] = custDetails["Quantity"] * custDetails["UnitPrice"]
# Consolidating accross the invoice number for gross value
retailConsol = custDetails.groupby('InvoiceNo')['grossValue'].sum().reset_index()
print(retailConsol.shape)
retailConsol.head()
Figure 3: Aggregated Data

Now that we have got the data consolidated based on each invoice number, let us merge the date related features from the original data frame with this consolidated data. We merge the consolidated data with the custDetails data frame and then drop all the duplicate data so that we get a record per invoice number, along with its date features.

# Merge the other information like date, week, month etc
retail = pd.merge(retailConsol,custDetails[["InvoiceNo",'Parse_date','Weekday','Day','Month','Year','year_month','monthPeriod']],how='left',on='InvoiceNo')
# dropping ALL duplicate values
retail.drop_duplicates(subset ="InvoiceNo",keep = 'first', inplace = True)
print(retail.shape)
retail.head()
Figure 4 : Consolidated data

Let us first look at the month wise consolidation of data and then plot the data. We will use a functions to map the months to its index position. This is required to plot the data according to months. The function ‘monthMapping‘, maps an integer value to the month and then sort the data frame.

# Create a map for each month
def monthMapping(mnthTrend):
    # Get the map
    mnthMap = {"January": 1, "February": 2,"March": 3, "April": 4,"May": 5, "June": 6,"July": 7, "August": 8,"September": 9, "October": 10,"November": 11, "December": 12}
    # Create a new feature for month
    mnthTrend['mnth'] = mnthTrend.Month
    # Replace with the numerical value
    mnthTrend['mnth'] = mnthTrend['mnth'].map(mnthMap)
    # Sort the data frame according to the month value
    return mnthTrend.sort_values(by = 'mnth').reset_index()

We will use the above function to consolidate the data according to the months and then plot month wise grossvalue data

mnthTrend = retail.groupby(['Month'])['grossValue'].agg('mean').reset_index().sort_values(by = 'grossValue',ascending = False)
# sort the months in the right order
mnthTrend = monthMapping(mnthTrend)
sns.set(rc = {'figure.figsize':(20,8)})
sns.lineplot(data=mnthTrend, x='Month', y='grossValue')
plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.02, 1), loc='upper left', borderaxespad=0)
plt.show()

We can see that there is sufficient amount of variability of data month on month. So therefore we will take months as one of the context items on which the states can be constructed.

Let us now look at buying pattern within each month and check how the buying pattern is within the first 15 days and the latter half

# Aggregating data for the first 15 days and latter 15 days
fortnighTrend = retail.groupby(['monthPeriod'])['grossValue'].agg('mean').reset_index().sort_values(by = 'grossValue',ascending = False)

sns.set(rc = {'figure.figsize':(20,8)})
sns.lineplot(data=fortnighTrend, x='monthPeriod', y='grossValue')
plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.02, 1), loc='upper left', borderaxespad=0)
plt.show()

We can see that there is as small difference between buying patterns in the first 15 days of the month and the latter half of the month. Eventhough the difference is not significant, we will still take this difference as another context.

Next let us aggregate data as per the days of the week and and check the trend

# Aggregating data accross weekdays
dayTrend = retail.groupby(['Weekday'])['grossValue'].agg('mean').reset_index().sort_values(by = 'grossValue',ascending = False)

sns.set(rc = {'figure.figsize':(20,8)})
sns.lineplot(data=dayTrend, x='Weekday', y='grossValue')
plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.02, 1), loc='upper left', borderaxespad=0)
plt.show()

We can also see that there is quite a bit of variability of buying patterns accross the days of the week. We will therefore take the week days also as another context

So far we have observed 4 different features, which will become our context for recommending products. The context which we have defined would act as the states from the reinforcement learning setting perspective. Let us now look at the big picture of how we will formulate the recommendation task as reinforcement learning setting.

The Big Picture

Figure 5: The Big Picture

We will now have a look at the big picture of this implementation. The above figure is the representation of what we will implement in code in the next few posts.

The process starts with the customer context, consisting of segment, month, period in the month and day of the week. The combination of all the contexts will form the state. From an implementation perspective we will run simulations to generate the context since we do not have a real system where customers logs in and thereby we automatically capture context.

Based on the context, the system will recommend different products to the customer. From a reinforcement learning context these are the actions which are taken from each state. The initial recommendation of products ( actions taken) will be based on the value function learned from the historical data.

The customer will give rewards/feedback based on the actions taken( products recommended ). The feedback would be the manifestation of the choices the customer make. The choice the customer makes like the products the customer buys, browses and ignores from the recommended list. Depending on the choice made by the customer, a certain reward will be generated. Again from an implementation perspective, since we do not have real customers giving feedback, we will be simulating the customer feedback mechanism.

Finally the update of the value functions based on the reward generated will be done based on the simple averaging method. Based on the value update, the bandit will learn and adapt to the affinities of the customers in the long run.

What next ?

In this post we explored the data and then got a big picture of what we will implement going forward. In the next post we will start implementing these processes and building a prototype using Jupyter notebook. Later on we will build an application using Python scripts and then explore options to deploy the application. Watch out this space for more.

 The next post will be published next week. Please subscribe to this blog post to get notifications when the next post is published.

You can also subscribe to our Youtube channel for all the videos related to this series.

The complete code base for the series is in the Bayesian Quest Git hub repository

Do you want to Climb the Machine Learning Knowledge Pyramid ?

Knowledge acquisition is such a liberating experience. The more you invest in your knowledge enhacement, the more empowered you become. The best way to acquire knowledge is by practical application or learn by doing. If you are inspired by the prospect of being empowerd by practical knowledge in Machine learning, subscribe to our Youtube channel

I would also recommend two books I have co-authored. The first one is specialised in deep learning with practical hands on exercises and interactive video and audio aids for learning

This book is accessible using the following links

The Deep Learning Workshop on Amazon

The Deep Learning Workshop on Packt

The second book equips you with practical machine learning skill sets. The pedagogy is through practical interactive exercises and activities.

The Data Science Workshop Book

This book can be accessed using the following links

The Data Science Workshop on Amazon

The Data Science Workshop on Packt

Enjoy your learning experience and be empowered !!!!

Building Self learning Recommendation System using Reinforcement Learning : Part I

In our previous series on building data science products we learned how to build a machine translation application and how to deploy the application. In this post we start a new series where in we will build a self learning recommendation system. We will be building this system using reinforcement learning methods. We will be leveraging the principles of the bandit problem to build our self learning recommendation engine. This series will be split across 8 posts.

Let us start our series with a primer on Recommendations systems and Reinforcement learning.

Primer on Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems (RS) are omnipresent phenomenon which we encounter in our day to day life. Powering the modern day e-commerce systems are gigantic ‘recommendation engines’, looking at each individual transactions, mapping customer profiles and using them to recommend personalized products and services.

Before we embark on building our self learning recommendation system, it will be a good idea to take a quick tour on different types of recommendation systems powering large e-commerce systems of the modern era.

For convenience let us classify recommendation systems into three categories,

Figure 1 : Different types of Recommendation Systems

Traditional recommendation systems leverages data involving user-item interactions ( buying behavior of users ,ratings given by users, etc. ) and attribute information of items ( textual descriptions of items ). Some of the popular type of recommendation systems under the traditional umbrella are

  • Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Systems : The fundamental principle behind collaborative filtering systems is that, two or more individuals who share similar interests tend to have similar propensities for buying. The similarity between individuals are unearthed using the ratings they give, their browsing patterns or their buying patterns. There are different types of collaborative filtering systems like user-based collaborative filtering, item-based collaborative filtering, model based methods ( decision trees, Bayesian models, latent factor models ),etc.
Figure 2 : Collaborative filtering Recommendation Systems
  • Content Based Recommendation Systems : In content based recommendation systems, attribute descriptions of the items are the basis of recommendations. For example if you are a person who watched the Jason Borne series movies and haven’t given any ratings, content based recommendation systems would infer your tastes from the attributes of the movies you watched like action thriller ,CIA , covert operations etc. Based on these attributes the system would recommend movies like Mission Impossible series, as they follow a similar genre.
Figure 3 : Content Based Recommendation Systems
  • Knowledge Based Recommendation Systems : These type of systems make recommendations based on similarity between a users requirements and an item descriptions. Knowledge based recommendation systems are usually useful in context where the purchases infrequent like buying an automobile, real estate, luxury goods etc.
Figure 4 : Knowledge Based Recommendation System
  • Hybrid Recommendation Systems : Hybrid systems or Ensemble systems as they might be called combine best features of the above mentioned approaches to generate recommendations. For example Netflix uses a combination of collaborative filtering ( based on user ratings) and content based( attribute descriptions of movies) to make recommendations.

Traditional class of recommendation systems like collaborative filtering are predominantly linear in its approach. However personalization of customer preferences are not necessarily linear and therefore there was need for modelling recommendation systems for behavior data which are mostly non linear and this led to the rise of deep learning based systems. There are many proponents of deep learning methods some of the notable ones are Youtube, ebay, Twitter and Spotify. Let us now see some of the most popular types of deep learning based recommendation systems.

  • Multi Layer Perceptron based Recommendation Systems : Multi layer perceptron or MLP based recommendation systems are feed-forward neural network systems with multiple layers between the input layer and output layer. The basic setting for this approach is to vectorize user information and item information as the basic inputs. This input layer is fed into the feed forward network and then the output is whether there is an interaction for the item or not. By modelling these interactions as a MLP we will be able to rank specific products in terms of the propensity of the user to that item.
Figure 5: MLP Based Recommendation System
  • CNN based Recommendation Systems : Convolutional Neural networks ( CNN ) are great feature extractors, i.e. they extract global level and local level features. These features are used for providing context which will aid in better recommendations.
  • RNN based Recommendation System: RNNs are good choices when there are sequences of data. In the context of a recommendation systems use cases like recommending what the user will click next can be treated as a sequence to sequence problem. In such problems the interactions between the user and an item at each session will be the basic data and the output will be what the customer clicked next. So if we have data pertaining to session information and the interaction of the user to items during the sessions, we will be able to model a RNN to be used as a Recommender system.
  • Neural attention based Recommendation Systems : Attention based recommendation systems leverage the attention mechanism which has great utility in use cases like machine translation, image captioning, to name a few. Attention based recommendation systems are more apt for recommending multimedia items like photos and videos. In multimedia recommendation, the user preferences can be implicit ( likes, views ). These implicit feed back need not always mean that a user liked that item. For example I might give a like to a video or photo shared by a friend even if I really don’t like those items. In such cases, attention based models attempt to weight the user-item interactions to give more emphasis to parts of the video or image which could be more aligned to the users preferences.
Figure 6 : Deep Learning Based Recommendation System ( Image source : dzone.com/articles/building-a-recommendation-system-using-deep-learni)

The above are some of the prevalent deep learning based recommendation systems. In addition to these there are other deep learning algorithms like Restricted Boltzmann machines based recommendation systems , Autoencoder based recommendation systems and Neural autoregressive recommendation systems . We will explore creation of recommendation systems with these types of models in a future post. Deep learning methods for recommendation systems have tremendous abilities to model non linear relationships between user interactions with items. However on the flip side, there is a severe problem of interpretability of models and the hunger for more data in deep learning methods. Off late deep reinforcement learning methods are widely used as recommendation systems. Deep reinforcement learning systems have abilities to model with large number of states and action spaces and this has made reinforcement learning methods to be used as recommendation systems. Let us explore some of the prominent types of reinforcement learning based recommendation systems.

Since this series is about the application of reinforcement learning to the application of recommendation systems, let us first understand what reinforcement learning is and then get into application of reinforcement learning as recommendation systems.

Primer on Reinforcement Learning

Unlike the supervised learning setting where there is a guide telling you what the right action is, reinforcement learning relies on the environment to discover what the right action is. The learning in reinforcement learning is through interaction with an environment. In the reinforcement learning setting there is an agent ( recommendation system in our context) which receives rewards ( feed back from users like buying, clicking) from the environment ( users ) . The rewards acts as an indicator as to whether the course of action taken by the agent is right or wrong. The agent ultimately learns to take the right action through feed backs received from the environment over a period of time.

Figure 7 : Reinforcement Learning Setting

Elements of Reinforcement Learning

Let us try to understand different elements of reinforcement learning with an example of a robot picking trash.

We will first explore an element of reinforcement learning called the ‘State’. A state can be defined as the representation of the environment in which a task has to be performed. In the context of our robot, we can say that it has two states.

State 1 : High charge

State 2 : Low charge.

Depending on the state the robot is in, it has three decision points to make.

  1. The robot can go on searching for trash.
  2. The robot can wait at its current location so that some one will pick up trash and give it to the robot
  3. The robot can got to its charging station to recharge so that it doesn’t go off power.

These decision points which are taken at each state is called an ‘Action‘ in reinforcement learning parlance.

Let us represent the states and its corresponding actions for our robot

From the above figure we can observe the states of the robot and the actions the robot can take. When the robot has high charge, there would only be two actions the robot is likely to take as there would be no point in recharging as the current charge is high.

Depending on the current state and the action taken from that state, the robot will transition to the next state. Let us look at some possible states the robot can end up based on the initial state and the action it takes.

State : High Charge ,Action : Search

When the current state is high charge and the action taken is search, there are two possible states the robot can attain, stay in its high charge( because the search was quickly over) or deplete its charge and end up with low charge.

State : High Charge ,Action : Wait

If the robot decides to wait when it is high on charge, the robot continues in its state of high charge.

State : Low Charge ,Action : Search

When the charge is low and the robot decides to search there can be two resultant states. One plausible scenario is for the charge to be completely drained making the robot unable to take further action. In such circumstance someone will have to physically take the robot to the charging point and the robot ends up with high charge.

The second scenario is when the robot do not make extensive search and as a result doesn’t drain much. In this scenario the robot continues in its state of low charge.

State : Low Charge ,Action : Wait

When the action is to wait with low charge the robot continues to remain in a state of low charge.

State : Low Charge ,Action : Recharge

Recharging the robot will enable the robot to return to a state of high charge.

Based on our discussions let us now represent the states, different action choices and the subsequent states the robot will end up

So far we have seen different starting states and subsequent states the robot ends up based on the action choices the robot makes. However, what about the consequences for the different action choices the robot makes ? We can see that there are some desirable consequences and some undesirable consequences. For example remaining in high charge state by searching for trash is a desirable consequence. However draining off its charge is an undesirable consequence. To optimize the behavior of the robot we need to encourage desirable consequences and strictly discourage undesirable tendencies. How do we inculcate desirable tendencies and discourage undesirable ones ? This is where the concept of rewards comes in.

The sole purpose of the robot is to collect as much trash as possible. This purpose can be effectively done only when the robot searches for trash. However in the process of searching for trash the robot is also supposed to take care of itself i.e. it should ensure that it has enough charge to go about the search so that it doesn’t drain of charge and make itself ineffective. So the desired behavior for the robot is to search and collect trash and the undesired behavior is to get into a drained state. In order to inculcate the desired behaviors we can introduce rewards when the robot collects trash and also penalizes the robot when it drains itself of its charge. The other actions of waiting and recharging will not have any reward or penalties involved. This system of rewards will imbibe right behaviors in the robot.

The example we have seen of the robot is a manifestation of reinforcement learning. Let us now try to derive the elements of reinforcement learning from the context of the robot.

As seen from the robot example, reinforcement learning is the process of learning what to do at different scenarios based on feed back received. Within this context the part of the robot which learns and decides what to do is called the agent .

The context within which an agent interacts is called the environment. In the context of the robot, it is the space where the robot interacts in the process of carrying out its task of picking trash.

When the agent interacts with its environment, at each time step, the agent manifests a certain state. In our example we saw that the robot had two states of high charge and low charge.

From each state the agent carries out certain actions. The actions an agent carries out from a state will determine the subsequent state. In our context we saw how the actions like searching, waiting or recharging from a starting state defined the state the robot ended up.

The other important element is the reward function. The reward function quantifies the consequences of following certain actions from a state. The kind of reward an agent receives for a state-action pair defines the desirability of doing that action given its state. The objective of an agent is to maximize the rewards it gets in the long run.

The reward function is the quantification of the consequences which is got immediately after following a certain action. It doesn’t look far out in the future whether the course of action is good in the long term. That is what a value function does. A value function looks at maximizing the rewards which gets accumulated over a long term horizon. Imagine that the robot was in a state of low charge and then it spots some trash at a certain distance. So the robot decides to search and pick that trash as it would give an immediate reward. However in the process of searching and picking up the trash its charge drains off and the robot become ineffective, getting a large penalty in the process. In this case, even though the short term reward was good, the long term effect was harmful. If the robot had instead moved to its charging station to get charged and then gone in search of the trash, the overall value would have been more rewarding.

The next element of the reinforcement learning context is the policy. A policy defines how the agent has to behave at different circumstances at a given time. It guides the agent on what needs to be done depending on the circumstances. Let us revisit the situation we saw earlier on the decision point of the robot to recharge or to search for trash it spotted. Let us say there was a policy which said that the robot will have to recharge when the charge drops below a certain threshold. In such cases, the robot could have avoided the situation where the charge was drained. The policy is like the heart of the reinforcement learning context. The policy drives the behavior of agents at different situations.

An optional element of a reinforcement context is the model of the environment. A model is a broad representation of how an environment will behave. Given a state and the action taken from the state a model can be used to predict the next states and also the rewards which will be generated from those actions. A model is used for planning the course of action the agent has to take based on the situation the agent is in.

To sum up, we have seen that Reinforcement learning is a framework which aims at automating the task of learning and decision making. The automation of the learning and decision making process is achieved through the interaction between an agent and its environment through its various states, actions and rewards. The end objective of an agent is to maximize the value function and to learn a policy which maximizes the value function. We will be diving more deeper into some specific types of reinforcement learning problems in the future posts. Let us now look at some of the approaches to solve a reinforcement learning problem.

Different approaches using reinforcement learning

  • Multi-armed bandits : The name multi-armed bandits is derived from the context of a gambler who tries to maximize his/her returns by pulling multiple arms of a slot machine. The gambler through the process of exploration has to find which of the n arms provide the best rewards and once a set of best arms are identified, try to exploit those arms to maximize the rewards he/she gets from the process. In the context of reinforcement learning the problem can be formulated from the perspective of an agent who tries to get sufficient information of the environment ( different slots ) based on extensive exploration and then using the information gained to maximize the returns. Different use cases where multi armed bandits can be used involves clinical trials, recommendation systems, A/B testing, etc.
Figure 8 : Multi Armed Bandit – Exploration v/s Exploitation
  • Markov Decision Process and Dynamic Programming: Markov decision process falls under a class of algorithms called the model based algorithms. The main constituents of a Markov process involves the agent which interacts with the environment by taking actions from different states in which the agent finds itself. In a model based process there is a well defined probability distribution when going from one state to the other. This probability distribution is called the transition probability. The below figure depicts the transition probability of the robot we saw earlier. For example, if the robot is at state of low charge and it takes the action search, it would remain in the same state with probability and attains high charge with transition probability of 1-. Similarly, from a high state, when taking the action wait, the robot will remain in high charge with probability of 1.
Figure 9 : Markov Decision Process for a Robot ( Image source : Reinforcement Learning, Sutton & Barto )

Markov decision process entails that when moving from one state to the other, the history of all the states in which an agent was, doesn’t matter. All that matters is the current state. Markov decision processes are generally best implemented by a collection of algorithms called dynamic programming. Dynamic programming helps in computing the most optimal policies as a Markov decision process given a perfect model of the environment. What we mean by a perfect model of the environment is where we know all the states, actions and the transition probabilities when moving from one state to the other.

There are different use cases involving MDP process, some of the notable ones include determination of number of patients in a hospital, reducing wait time at intersections etc.

  • Monte Carlo Methods : Monte Carlo methods unlike dynamic programming and Markov decision processes, do not make assumptions on knowledge on the environment. Monte Carlo methods learns through experience. These methods rely on sampling sequences of states, actions and rewards to attain the most optimal solution.
  • Temporal difference Methods : Temporal difference methods can be said as a combination of dynamic programming methods and Monte Carlo methods. Temporal difference methods can learn from experience like Monte Carlo methods and they also can also estimate the value function based on earlier learning without waiting for the end of an episode. Due to its simplicity temporal difference methods are great for learning experiences derived from interaction with environment in an online mode. Temporal difference methods are great to make long term predictions like predicting customer purchases, weather patterns, election outcomes etc.
Figure 10 : Comparison of backup diagram for MC,TD & DP ( Image source : David Silver’s RL Course, lecture 4 )
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning methods : Deep reinforcement learning methods combine traditional reinforcement learning and deep learning techniques. One pre-requisite of traditional reinforcement learning is the understanding of states and making decisions on what actions to take from each state. However reinforcement learning gets constrained when the number of states become very huge as in the case of many of the online data sets. This is where deep reinforcement learning techniques comes in handy. Deep reinforcement learning algorithms are able to take large input sets, which has large state spaces and make decisions on what actions to take to optimize the end objective. Deep reinforcement learning methods have wide applications in robotic, natural language processing, computer vision, finance, healthcare to name a few.
Figure 11 : Deep Reinforcement Learning

Having got an overview of the types of reinforcement learning systems, let us look at how reinforcement learning approaches can be used for building recommendation systems.

Reinforcement learning for recommendation systems

User interactions with items are sequential and it has a rich context to it. For this reason the problem of predicting the best item to a user can also be viewed as a sequential decision problem. In the primer on reinforcement systems, we learned that in a reinforcement learning setting, an agent aims to maximize a numerical reward through interactions with an environment. Bringing this to the recommendation system context, it is like the recommendation system (agent) trying to recommend an item ( an action ) to the user to maximize the user satisfaction ( reward ).

Let us now look at some of the approaches in which reinforcement learning is used as recommendation systems.

  • Multi armed bandit based recommendation systems : Recommendation systems can learn policies or decisions on what to recommend to whom by broadly two approaches. The first one is the traditional offline learning mode which we explored at the start of this article. The next approach is the online learning mode where the recommendation system will suggest an item to the user based on the users context like time of day, place, history, previous interactions etc. One of the basic type of systems which implement the online system is the multi armed bandit approach. This approach will basically treat the recommendation task like pulling the levers of an armed bandit.
Figure 12 : Multi-Armed Bandit as Recommendation System
  • Normal reinforcement learning based recommendation systems : Many of the reinforcement learning approaches which we explored earlier like MDP, Monte Carlo and Temporal Difference are widely used as recommendation systems. One such example is in the use of MDP based recommendation systems for recommending songs to users. In this problem setting the states represents the list of songs to be recommended, the action is the act of listening to songs, the transition probability is the probability of selecting a particular song having listened to a song and the reward is the implicit feed back received when the user actually listens to the recommended song.
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning based recommendation systems : Deep reinforcement learning systems have the ability to learn multiple states and action spaces. In a typical personalized online recommendation systems the number of states and actions are quite large and deep reinforcement learning systems are good fit for such use cases. Take the case of an approach to recommend movies based on a framework called Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Framework. In this use case, user preferences are used to learn a policy which will thereby be used to select the movies to be recommended for the user. The learning of the policy is done using the deep deterministic policy gradient framework, which enables learning policies dynamically. The dynamic policy vector is then applied on the candidate set of movies to get a personalized set of movies to the user.

There are different use cases and multiple approaches to use reinforcement learning systems as recommendation systems. We will deal with more sophisticated reinforcement learning based recommendation systems in future posts.

What Next ?

So far in this post we have taken a quick overview of the main concepts. Obviously the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So we will get to that in the next post.

As this series is based on the multi armed bandit approach for recommendation systems, we will get hands on programming experience with multi armed bandit problems. In the next post we will build a multi armed bandit problem formulation from scratch using Python and then implement some simulated experiments using multi armed bandits. The next post will be published next week. Please subscribe to this blog post to get notifications when the next post is published.

You can also subscribe to our Youtube channel for all the videos related to this series.

The complete code base for the series is in the Bayesian Quest Git hub repository

Do you want to Climb the Machine Learning Knowledge Pyramid ?

Knowledge acquisition is such a liberating experience. The more you invest in your knowledge enhacement, the more empowered you become. The best way to acquire knowledge is by practical application or learn by doing. If you are inspired by the prospect of being empowerd by practical knowledge in Machine learning, subscribe to our Youtube channel

I would also recommend two books I have co-authored. The first one is specialised in deep learning with practical hands on exercises and interactive video and audio aids for learning

This book is accessible using the following links

The Deep Learning Workshop on Amazon

The Deep Learning Workshop on Packt

The second book equips you with practical machine learning skill sets. The pedagogy is through practical interactive exercises and activities.

The Data Science Workshop Book

This book can be accessed using the following links

The Data Science Workshop on Amazon

The Data Science Workshop on Packt

Enjoy your learning experience and be empowered !!!!