recommendation engine - Amazon Personalize different Event Types have different Importance

Question

I'm developing a recommendation engine using Amazon Personalize, and found that in interaction dataset, we can input different EVENT_TYPE and corresponding EVENT_VALUE.

If I build the model with two event types (like purchase & click), can I say I can make the model training understand that purchase event is more important(indicate stronger interaction) than click event by setting EVENT_VALUE of purchase to 10, and EVENT_VALUE of click to 3 in the interaction dataset, and perform the model training that way?

Answer 1

Short answer

No - Personalize don't care about EVENT_VALUE for calculating recommendations.

The use of event value

In general, Personalize doesn't include event value during training of the model. It's simply ignored.

However you can use it for implementing your own logic. For example, you can provide Event value threshold during the Solution creation:

This value threshold will be used to determine, if given interaction should be ignored, during Solution training. For example, if event value is percentage progress of watching a video, then having a threshold of 0.9 will make sure, than interactions included during the training, were about fully watching the video.

The use of event type

As you can see on the picture above, you can specify the event type itself, so the given solution will ignore all of the interactions, that doesn't match event type. It might be helpful in some cases.

Event type can be also used in Filters option, which was added a few months ago. It might be helpful to filter out the Items, that User already fully watched or bought, examples:

EXCLUDE itemId WHERE INTERACTIONS.event_type in ("fully_watched")

EXCLUDE itemId WHERE INTERACTIONS.event_type in ("purchased")