RecSys Challenge 2015 and the YOOCHOOSE Dataset

David Ben-Shimon, Alexander Tsikinovsky, Michael Friedmann, Bracha Shapira, Lior Rokach, Johannes Hoerle

Abstract: The 2015 ACM Recommender Systems Challenge offered the opportunity to work on a large-scale e-commerce dataset from a big retailer in Europe which is accepting recommender system as a service from YOOCHOOSE. Participants tackled the problem of predicting what items a user intends to purchase, if any, given a click sequence performed during an activity session on the e-commerce website. The challenge ran for seven months and was very successful, attracting 850 teams from 49 countries which submitted a total of 5,437 solutions. The winners of the challenge scored approximately 50% of the maximum score, which we considered as an impressive achievement. In this paper we provide a brief overview of the challenge and its results.