Bosca / Recommendations

The model

A recommender that trains itself

Two models do the work: one understands your content the day it's created, and one learns from how people behave. Both retrain on your complete eligible data, validated versions publish automatically, and you can select a version or compare two versions in a live test.

Two models, one engine

Meaning and behavior

The content model

Learns from each item's own features and meaning — its type, language, categories, and what the text is actually about.

  • Works from day one — new content is recommendable before its first interaction.
  • Powers "similar" and the cold-start fallback for brand-new profiles.
  • Understands meaning, so two pieces on the same topic read as alike even with different words.

The personalized model

Learns a representation of each person and each item from real interactions, then ranks one against the other.

  • Trains once there's enough interaction history to learn from.
  • Reads a person through their signals and affinities, so even a new viewer gets a feature-based feed.
  • Drives the personalized feed and the per-viewer re-ranking on every surface.

Training & validation

Every eligible signal stays in

Training runs in the background — kick one off and it produces a new candidate model from every active profile and every eligible interaction. The exported artifact must then load and satisfy the serving contract. A candidate that passes publishes automatically.

  • Profiles without history are still represented, using shared signals when available.
  • No interaction or feedback cohort is withheld to grade the model.
  • Automatic mode serves the newest validated version; administrators can pin a recent version.
candidate validation
Contractpassed
Facetspreserved ✓
validated versions publish automatically

A/B testing

Prove it in production

Functional validation proves that a model can serve; real usage shows whether it is better. Two ready-made experiments let you find out: put the model up against a simpler heuristic, or a new model version up against the current one. Each splits traffic by a feature flag and measures engagement and positive feedback.

  • Experiments start switched off — you provision them, then turn them on when you're ready.
  • If a flag is off, missing, or errors, serving quietly falls back to the production default.
engine experiment · 50 / 50
Arm A — the model50%
Arm B — heuristic50%
goal · engagementgoal · positive feedback

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