{"id":167,"date":"2006-02-11T02:57:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-11T08:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=167"},"modified":"2006-02-11T02:59:39","modified_gmt":"2006-02-11T08:59:39","slug":"yahoos-learning-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo’s Learning Problems."},"content":{"rendered":"

I just visited Yahoo Research<\/a> which has several fundamental learning problems near to (or beyond) the set of problems we know how to solve well. Here are 3 of them.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Ranking<\/strong> This is the canonical problem of all search engines. It is made extra difficult for several reasons.\n
      \n
    1. There is relatively little “good” supervised learning data and a great deal of data with some signal (such as click through rates).<\/li>\n
    2. The learning must occur in a partially adversarial environment. Many people very actively attempt to place themselves at the top of
      \nrankings.<\/li>\n
    3. It is not even quite clear whether the problem should be posed as ‘ranking’ or as ‘regression’ which is then used to produce a
      \nranking.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
    4. Collaborative filtering<\/strong> Yahoo has a large number of recommendation systems for music, movies, etc… In these sorts of systems, users specify how they liked a set of things, and then the system can (hopefully) find some more examples of things they might like
      \nby reasoning across multiple such sets. <\/li>\n
    5. Exploration with Generalization<\/strong> The cash cow of
      \nsearch engines is displaying advertisements which are relevant to search along with search results. Better targeting these advertisements makes money (a small improvement might be worth $millions) and improves the value of the search engine for the user. <\/p>\n

      It is natural to predict the set of advertisements which maximize the advertising payoff. This natural idea is stymied by both the extreme
      \nmultiplicity of advertisements under contract (think millions) and a lack of ability to measure hypotheticals like “What would have
      \nhappened if we had displayed a different set of advertisements for this (query,user) pair instead?” This is a combined exploration and
      \ngeneralization problem.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Good solutions to any of these problems would be extremely useful (and not just at Yahoo). Even further small improvements on the existing solutions may be very useful.<\/p>\n

      For those interested, Yahoo (as an organization) knows these are learning problems and is very actively interested in solving them. Yahoo Research is committed to a relatively open method of solving these problems. Dennis DeCoste<\/a> is one contact point for machine learning research at Yahoo Research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I just visited Yahoo Research which has several fundamental learning problems near to (or beyond) the set of problems we know how to solve well. Here are 3 of them. Ranking This is the canonical problem of all search engines. It is made extra difficult for several reasons. There is relatively little “good” supervised learning … <\/p>\n

      Continue reading “Yahoo’s Learning Problems.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-machine-learning","category-problems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}