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Solution Background and Business Value

Personalized try-something-new recommendations introduce customers to products they haven’t purchased before but are likely to enjoy based on their buying habits and preferences. This strategy enhances customer experience by encouraging product discovery while also expanding sales into new product categories.

By integrating these recommendations into push notifications, in-product placements, and email campaigns, businesses can:

  • Drive cross-selling opportunities by exposing customers to new product lines.

  • Enhance customer satisfaction by keeping the shopping experience fresh.

  • Increase engagement and retention by offering relevant and timely suggestions.

This proactive approach helps businesses maintain a competitive edge by increasing customer interaction and maximizing revenue.

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Data Requirements Graph Schema

To develop an effective Try-Something-New recommendation model, we need a structured dataset. While a small set of core tables is sufficient to start, Kumo AI enables us to improve the model by incorporating additional sources of data.

Core Tables

The three essential tables required for this solution are:

  1. Users Table

    • Stores details about users for whom we want to generate recommendations.

    • Key attributes:

      • user_id: Unique identifier (Primary Key).

      • join_timestamp: When the user joined.

      • Other optional features: age, location, and shopping behavior.

  2. Items Table

    • Stores information about the items available for recommendation.

    • Key attributes:

      • item_id: Unique identifier (Primary Key).

      • start_timestamp / end_timestamp: Availability period of the item.

      • Other optional features: price, category, color, and brand.

  3. Transactions Table

    • Stores user purchase history, which the model learns from.

    • Key attributes:

      • transaction_id: Unique identifier (Primary Key).

      • user_id: Foreign Key linking to Users.

      • item_id: Foreign Key linking to Items.

      • timestamp: When the purchase was made.

      • Other optional features: total amount, payment method, and discount applied.

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)

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Predictive Query

The challenge in try-something-new recommendations is balancing item similarity and user behavior modeling while ensuring recommendations remain novel to the user. Training a model solely on new purchases would discard valuable purchasing patterns.

Instead of training on only first-time purchases, we train a general item-to-user recommendation model and apply filters at prediction time to remove items the user has already purchased. This ensures:

  • The model learns broad user-item affinity.

  • Users receive only new product recommendations.

PREDICT LIST_DISTINCT(transactions.item_id, 0, X, days) RANK TOP 50
FOR EACH users.user_id

This query:

  • Predicts the top 50 distinct items a user is likely to buy.

  • Looks at a future X-day window to determine potential purchases.

Filtering for New Recommendations

Try-something-new recommendations are particularly effective for users who are not highly active, as they encourage engagement. We can filter out highly active users and only target those with fewer than N purchases in the last D days.

WHERE COUNT(transactions.*, -D, 0, days) < N

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Building models in Kumo SDK

This solution can be efficiently implemented using Kumo AI, which simplifies ML modeling on relational data.

1. Initialize the Kumo SDK

import kumoai as kumo

kumo.init(url="https://<customer_id>.kumoai.cloud/api", api_key=API_KEY)

2. Connect data

connector = kumo.S3Connector("s3://your-dataset-location/")

3. Select tables

users = kumo.Table.from_source_table(
    source_table=connector.table('users'),
    primary_key='user_id',
).infer_metadata()

items = kumo.Table.from_source_table(
    source_table=connector.table('items'),
    primary_key='item_id',
).infer_metadata()

transactions = kumo.Table.from_source_table(
    source_table=connector.table('transactions'),
    time_column='timestamp',
).infer_metadata()

4. Create graph schema

graph = kumo.Graph(
    tables={
        'users': users,
        'items': items,
        'transactions': transactions,
    },
    edges=[
        dict(src_table='transactions', fkey='user_id', dst_table='users'),
        dict(src_table='transactions', fkey='item_id', dst_table='items'),
    ],
)

graph.validate(verbose=True)

5. Train the model

pquery = kumo.PredictiveQuery(
    graph=graph,
    query=(
        "PREDICT LIST_DISTINCT(transactions.item_id, 0, X, days) RANK TOP 50\n"
        "FOR EACH users.user_id"
    ),
)
pquery.validate(verbose=True)

model_plan = pquery.suggest_model_plan()
trainer = kumo.Trainer(model_plan)
training_job = trainer.fit(
    graph=graph,
    train_table=pquery.generate_training_table(non_blocking=True),
    non_blocking=False,
)
print(f"Training metrics: {training_job.metrics()}")

6. Run the model

prediction_job = trainer.predict(
    graph=graph,
    prediction_table=pquery.generate_prediction_table(non_blocking=True),
    output_types={'predictions', 'embeddings'},
    output_connector=connector,
    output_table_name='try_something_new_predictions',
    training_job_id=training_job.job_id,
    non_blocking=False,
)
print(f'Batch prediction job summary: {prediction_job.summary()}')
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