From Hacks to Harmony: Structuring Product Rules in Recommendations

Don’t let heuristics undermine your ML, learn to combine them

In today’s data-driven landscape, recommendation systems power everything from social media feeds to e-commerce. While it’s tempting to think that machine learning algorithms do all the heavy lifting, that’s only half the story. Real-world systems often rely on a mix of machine learning and heuristic rules — commonly referred to as product rules, business rules, or simply hacks — to generate the most relevant recommendations.

For example:

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