Comparison of Recommender Systems in an Ed-Tech Application
share
Smile and Learn is an Ed-Tech company that runs a smart library with more that 100 applications, games and interactive stories, aimed at children aged 2 to 10 and their families. Given the complexity of navigating all the content, the library implements a recommender system. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two aspects of such system: the influence of the order of recommendations on user exploratory behavior, and the impact of the choice of the recommendation algorithm on engagement. The assessment, based on data collected between 2018/10/15 and 2018/12/01, required the analysis of the number of clicks performed on the recommendations depending on their ordering, and an A/B/C testing where two recommender algorithms were compared with a random recommendation that served as baseline. The results suggest a direct connection between the order of the recommendation and the interest raised, and the superiority of recommendations based on popularity against other alternatives.
READ FULL TEXT