Personalizing LinkedIn Feed

Deepak Agarwal, Bee-Chung Chen, Qi He, Zhenhao Hua, Guy Lebanon, Yiming Ma, Pannagadatta Shivaswamy, Hsiao-Ping Tseng, Jaewon Yang, Liang Zhang

Abstract: LinkedIn dynamically delivers update activities from a user's interpersonal network to more than 300 million members in the personalized feed that ranks activities according their "relevance" to the user. This paper discloses the implementation details behind this personalized feed system at LinkedIn which can not be found from related work, and addresses the scalability and data sparsity challenges for deploying the system online. More specifically, we focus on the personalization models by generating three kinds of affinity scores: Viewer-ActivityType Affinity, Viewer-Actor Affinity, and Viewer-Actor-ActivityType Affinity. Extensive experiments based on online bucket tests (A/B experiments) and offline evaluation illustrate the effect of our personalization models in LinkedIn feed.