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by rcsorensen
4560 days ago
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How are you handling time variations? Behavior varies across time of day, day of week, time of month, and obviously seasonally. Any thought to more transient things like recent press releases, or the bug that happened for IE9 browsers for 3 hours? I see graphs in the article for time of day, and day of week, are longer term cycles found and used? |
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We don't currently look at time-of-month and seasonal variation by default. This is because most people using our service at the moment, are not trying to optimise for a monthly or seasonal time horizon. If this changes, we'll add those features.
You also ask about transient events: Our system is adaptively responsive to short term changes in trends. It has certain assumptions about the preferences of users, which it is constantly testing and monitoring. If those assumptions turn out the be wrong, they get checked correspondingly more, and this process forms a feedback loop.
So, if there's a short term change in behaviour, that changes a user behaviour a large amount, the system will adapt to that quickly. If it can't tell the short term change apart from random noise, then it won't adapt - but thats a limitation of any system - for it to detect a short term change, the change either has to have a large magnitude, or it has to see many users with that change (probably 100s but maybe 1000s, depending on the magnitude of the change).