Recombee
Item Segmentations

Tomas Rehorek

Jan 11, 2023

Item Segmentations is Recombee's original and elegant solution to various advanced tasks related to hierarchical and relational data. The feature provides a flexible way to group Items (products or pieces of content in your catalog) into Segments based on shared conditions. Items can be segmented by authors, genres, vendors, categories, but also by their combinations and advanced conditions such as year of production or price ranges.

Compared to traditional approaches based on so-called item affinities, Recombee Item Segments are separate objects that can:

1. be Recommended and Searched in novel ways,
2. be Flexibly and Dynamically defined and modified on top of the existing catalog.

Recommending and Searching

Since they are independent entities, Item Segments can be recommended and searched for. "Top Categories for you", "Similar Artists", or "Searching for a Category", are all natural use cases for recommendation and searching Item Segments.

Recombee models actively work with the relations between Items and Item Segments, ensuring the information is properly propagated. Interacting with Items from a particular Item Segment yields indirect information about a user's interest in a particular Segment.

Flexibility

Item Segmentations are defined using the existing data in the Items catalog. Therefore, no additional implementation work is typically needed to create the Segmentations in your Recombee Database.

Multiple Segmentations can co-exist in the same Recombee database on top of the same Item catalog. And each Segmentation can focus on different aspects and characteristics (e.g. one Segmentation based on category and another based on the vendor of the product).

In the simplest case, an Item Segmentation is based on a single property (column) of the Items catalog (e.g. category).

However, we also offer more advanced ways for defining the Item Segmentation that make use of the ReQL (Recombee Query Language). This comes in handy e.g. in the case of the personalized re-ordering of the rows on the homepage (each row can be defined by a ReQL expression that describes items that are available within the row).

Item Segments automatically appear and disappear on the fly along with changes in the Item catalog. Additionally, a single Item may (or may not) be a part of multiple Segments within the same Segmentation (e.g. movie with multiple genres).

How Does This Look in Practice?

Let's demonstrate the power of this feature with a real-life example on a VoD platform.

Consider the following data about the Items.

You can easily create a Segmentation based on the genres property in the Recombee Admin UI.

You will get a preview of the Segments yielded by the created Segmentation.

Now you can use the Recommend Item Segments To User API Endpoint to recommend the top genres for each user!

Do you want to know more? Explore Item Segmentations Docs

Let's Connect

Are you keen on trying Recombee Item Segmentations? We are happy to provide integration support at support@recombee.com or assist with any general inquiries at business@recombee.com.

If you just want to learn more about how personalization can be applied to your use case, get inspired in our Case Study section, and explore the application of AI recommendations in various domains.