Machine Learning @ Amazon

[Keynote Talk]
Rajeev Rastogi
Director, Machine Learning
Amazon
Bangalore, India
rastogi@amazon.com

ABSTRACT
In this talk, I will first provide an overview of the key Ma-
chine Learning (ML) applications we are developing at Ama-
zon. I will then describe a matrix factorization model that
we have developed for making product recommendations
aAS the salient characteristics of the model are: (1) It uses
a Bayesian approach to handle data sparsity, (2) It lever-
ages user and item features to handle the cold start prob-
lem, and (3) It introduces latent variables to handle multiple
personas associated with a user account (e.g. family mem-
bers). Our experimental results with synthetic and real-life
datasets show that leveraging user and item features, and
incorporating user personas enables our model to provide
lower RMSE and perplexity compared to baselines.

Bio
Rajeev Rastogi is the Director of Machine Learning at Ama-
zon. Previously, he was the Vice President of Yahoo! Labs
Bangalore, and the founding Director of the Bell Labs Re-
search Center in Bangalore. Rajeev is active in the fields of
machine learning, databases, data mining, and networking,
and has served on the program committees of several con-
ferences in these areas. He currently serves on the editorial
board of the CACM, and has been an Associate editor for
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in
the past. He has published over 125 papers, and holds over
50 patents. Rajeev is an ACM Fellow and a Bell Labs Fel-
low. He received his B. Tech degree from IIT Bombay, and
a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of
Texas, Austin.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

I.2.6 [Artificial Intelligence]: LearningMachine Learn-
ing

Keywords
Machine Learning

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-
party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact
the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CODS-IKDD 15 March 20-20, 2015, Bangalore, India
ACM 978-1-4503-3616-1/15/03.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2778865.2778867