What is a candidate generation?
The initial set of recommendations chosen by a recommendation system.
candidate generation explained in plain English
The initial set of recommendations chosen by a recommendation system. For example, consider a bookstore that offers 100,000 titles. The candidate generation phase creates a much smaller list of suitable books for a particular user, say 500. But even 500 books is way too many to recommend to a user. Subsequent, more expensive, phases of a recommendation system (such as scoring and re-ranking) reduce those 500 to a much smaller, more useful set of recommendations. See Candidate generation overview in the Recommendation Systems course for more information.
Example
Practitioners refer to candidate generation when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.
People also read
- A/B testing
A statistical way of comparing two (or more) techniques—the A and the B.
- ablation
A technique for evaluating the importance of a feature or component by temporarily removing it from a model.
- accuracy
The number of correct classification predictions divided by the total number of predictions.
- activation function
A function that enables neural networks to learn nonlinear (complex) relationships between features and the label.
- active learning
A training approach in which the algorithm chooses some of the data it learns from.
- adaptation
Synonym for tuning or fine-tuning.
- agglomerative clustering
See hierarchical clustering.
- anomaly detection
The process of identifying outliers.
- area under the PR curve
See PR AUC (Area under the PR Curve).
- area under the ROC curve
See AUC (Area under the ROC curve).