Personalized Transaction Kernels for Recommendation Using MCTS

We study pairwise preference data to model the behavior of users in online recommendation problems. We first propose a tensor kernel to model contextual transactions of a user in a joint feature space. The representation is extended to all users via hash functions that allow to effectively store and retrieve personalized slices of data and context. In order to quickly focus on the relevant properties of the next item to display, we propose the use of Monte-Carlo tree search on the learned preference values. Empirically, on real-world transaction data, both the preference models as well as the search tree exhibit excellent performance over baseline approaches.