Automatic Generation of Product Concepts from Positive Examples, with an Application to Music Streaming

TL;DR

This paper introduces methods to automatically generate product concepts from positive examples using database queries, with applications demonstrated in music streaming services to improve catalog organization and recommendations.

Contribution

It presents novel approaches combining PU learning with decision trees and clustering to learn product concepts from positive examples, applicable across different product types.

Findings

Effective in a simulated music streaming setup

Successfully learns product concepts from positive examples

Demonstrates potential for improving catalog structuring

Abstract

Internet based businesses and products (e.g. e-commerce, music streaming) are becoming more and more sophisticated every day with a lot of focus on improving customer satisfaction. A core way they achieve this is by providing customers with an easy access to their products by structuring them in catalogues using navigation bars and providing recommendations. We refer to these catalogues as product concepts, e.g. product categories on e-commerce websites, public playlists on music streaming platforms. These product concepts typically contain products that are linked with each other through some common features (e.g. a playlist of songs by the same artist). How they are defined in the backend of the system can be different for different products. In this work, we represent product concepts using database queries and tackle two learning problems. First, given sets of products that all belong to the same unknown product concept, we learn a database query that is a representation of this product concept. Second, we learn product concepts and their corresponding queries when the given sets of products are associated with multiple product concepts. To achieve these goals, we propose two approaches that combine the concepts of PU learning with Decision Trees and Clustering. Our experiments demonstrate, via a simulated setup for a music streaming service, that our approach is effective in solving these problems.