The Drivetrain Approach

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  - https://www.oreilly.com/radar/drivetrain-approach-data-products/
- ![image.png](../assets/image_1695129967071_0.png)
- Let's consider another example: recommendation systems. The *objective* of a recommendation engine is to drive additional sales by surprising and delighting the customer with recommendations of items they would not have purchased without the recommendation. The *lever* is the ranking of the recommendations. New *data* must be collected to generate recommendations that will *cause new sales*. This will require conducting many randomized experiments in order to collect data about a wide range of recommendations for a wide range of customers. This is a step that few organizations take; but without it, you don't have the information you need to actually optimize recommendations based on your true objective (more sales!).
- Finally, you could build two *models* for purchase probabilities, conditional on seeing or not seeing a recommendation. The difference between these two probabilities is a utility function for a given recommendation to a customer. It will be low in cases where the algorithm recommends a familiar book that the customer has already rejected (both components are small) or a book that they would have bought even without the recommendation (both components are large and cancel each other out).