This talk is about the journey to bring Learning To Rank (LTR from now on) to the e-commerce domain in a real world scenario, including all the pitfalls and disillutions involved.
LTR is a fantastic approach to solve complex ranking problems but industry domains are far from being the ideal world where those technologies were designed and experimented : open source software implementations are not working perfectly out of the box and require advanced tuning; industry training data is dirty, noisy and incomplete.
This talk will guide you through the different phases and technologies involved in a LTR project with a pragmatic approach.
Feature Engineering, Domain Modelling, Training Set Building, Model Training, Search Integration and Online Evaluation : each of them presents different challenges in the real world and must be carefully approached.