Serenade - Low-Latency Session-Based Recommendation in e-Commerce at Scale

Session-based recommendation predicts the next item with which a user will interact, given a sequence of her past interactions with other items. This machine learning problem targets a core scenario in e-commerce platforms, which aim to recommend interesting items to buy to users browsing the site. Session-based recommenders are difficult to scale due to their exponentially large input space of potential sessions. This impedes offline precomputation of the recommendations, and implies the necessity to maintain state during the online computation of next-item recommendations.

We propose VMIS-kNN, an adaptation of a state-of-the-art nearest neighbor approach to session-based recommendation, which leverages a prebuilt index to compute next-item recommendations with low latency in scenarios with hundreds of millions of clicks to search through. Based on this approach, we design and implement the scalable session-based recommender system Serenade, which is in production usage at bol.com, a large European e-commerce platform.

We evaluate the predictive performance of VMIS-kNN, and show that Serenade can answer a thousand recommendation requests per second with a 90th percentile latency of less than seven milliseconds in scenarios with millions of items to recommend. Furthermore, we present results from a three week long online A/B test with up to 600 requests per second for 6.5 million distinct items on more than 45 million user sessions from our e-commerce platform. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first empirical evidence that the superior predictive performance of nearest neighbor approaches to session-based recommendation in offline evaluations translates to superior performance in a real world e-commerce setting.