Learning to be relevant: evolution of a course recommendation system

Gungor Polatkan

Abstract: We present the evolution of a large-scale content recommendation platform for LinkedIn Learning, serving 645M+ LinkedIn users across several different channels (eg, desktop, mobile). We address challenges and complexities from both algorithms and infrastructure perspectives. We describe the progression from unsupervised models that exploit member similarity with course content, to supervised learning models leveraging member interactions with courses, and finally to hyper-personalized mixed-effects models with several million coefficients. For all the experiments, we include metric lifts achieved via online A/B tests and illustrate the trade-offs between computation and storage requirements.