Comparison of Real-Time and Batch Job Recommendations

Collaborative filtering recommendation systems are traditionally trained in a batch manner and are designed to produce personalized recommendations for a large number of users at the same time. However, in many industrial use cases, it is reasonable to produce recommendations in real time, taking account of very recent user interactions. In this work, we present the implementation of batch and real-time recommendation systems using the example of the RP3Beta model, a simple scalable graph-based model that outperforms multiple more advanced models. Our approach can be utilized by any recommendation system if user-to-item recommendations can be obtained based on item-to-item recommendations. We show that it covers multiple common recommendation models, especially collaborative filtering approaches where user features are not available. We also provide the results of A/B tests comparing these two approaches in a real-world scenario of a job recommendation task, conducted with almost 200,000 OLX users. We report at least 10% more users applying for recommended job ads when using a real-time instead of a batch approach. We believe that our results can help other organizations to take informed decisions about whether to make the effort of moving from a batch to a real-time recommendation setting.