Predicting User Preferences with XGBoost Learning to Rank Method

Learning user preferences become very important as the personalization systems grow rapidly in this current era. Offering special and personal services can be an added value for the companies to maintain their customer loyalty. Building a personalized recommendation requires a good machine learning model to understand the individual preferences. Every user can be presented with a list of items sorted by its score learned from the individual preferences. So the first couple items shown will be the most liked items by the user. We can borrow the Learning to Rank algorithm from Information Retrieval to solve this problem. In this paper, we present the implementation of user preferences learning by using XGBoost Learning to Rank method in movie domain. We show the evaluation of three different approaches in Learning to Rank according to their Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) score. We can conclude that in our case study, the pairwise approach appears to be the best solution to produce a personalized list of recommendation.