Signals provide the data that Managed Fusion uses to generate collaborative recommendations. The simplest way to get started is to enable signals and recommendations in one of your primary collections. Once you do this, Managed Fusion automatically creates a set of default objects and begins creating and updating collections of recommendations on a regular schedule.
Content-based recommendations can be used without enabling signals or recommendations, but they require manual configuration.
LucidAcademyLucidworks offers free training to help you get started.The Course for Recommendations focuses on how Fusion uses signals to automatically produce custom recommendations to offer users the items most relevant to their experience:
RecommendationsPlay Button
Visit the LucidAcademy to see the full training catalog.

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Enable signals

Signals are enabled by default for new collections when you have a Managed Fusion license installed. You can enable or disable signals for any collection at Collections > Collections Manager. Enable Signals Enabling signals automatically creates a set of aggregation jobs which create the input data for recommendations. See Signals and Aggregations for complete details.

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Enable recommendations

Recommendations are not enabled by default. You can enable recommendations in either of the following ways:
  • Collections Manager. Sign in to Managed Fusion and select your application. Then click Collections > Collections Manager. Click the gear icon of your collection and select Enable Recommendations. Enable Recommendations
  • Relevance. Sign in to Managed Fusion and select your application. Then click Relevance > Recommendations.
For either method, the system displays the Enable Recommendations dialog box. Click Enable Recommendations to automatically enable the items-for-user and items-for-item recommendation methods. To use additional recommendation methods, you must configure them separately.

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Default objects for recommendations

When recommendations are enabled, Managed Fusion automatically creates a default set of collections, jobs, schedules, and query pipelines that provide basic functionality for recommendations. You can tune the default jobs and pipelines as needed to refine the results, or create new ones, then configure your search application to request recommendations from the query pipelines. See also the default objects created when you enable signals. These must already exist when you enable recommendations.

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Collections

  • COLLECTION_NAME_items_for_item_recommendations Collection to hold generated item-item similarities (by default 10 per item). No user_id_s data is present. A Recommend Items for Item query pipeline stage can use the similarities to return item recommendations. For example, a query in which doc_id_s = docA would return an ordered list of other doc_id_s values for documents that are similar to document docA, along with the similarities. For example: [("docB", 0.83), ("docC", 0.55), ("docD", 0.43), …​, ("docK", 0.22)].
  • COLLECTION_NAME_items_for_user_recommendations Collection to hold recommended items for a user. By default the job creates 10 recommendations per user.
  • COLLECTION_NAME_recs_aggr Collection to hold the output of recommender aggregation jobs.
  • COLLECTION_NAME_bpr_user_recs and COLLECTION_NAME_bpr_item_recs Collections for Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) recs, user-item, and item-item (respectively).
  • COLLECTION_NAME_content_recs Collection for content-based recommender recs.
  • COLLECTION_NAME_recommender_models Collection that stores ALS models.
  • COLLECTION_NAME_queries_query_recs Collection for output of the Query-Query Similarity Job.

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Jobs and schedules

Enabling recommendations creates the new jobs below, each using a different method to produce items-for-item and items-for-user recommendations. These jobs consume the output of the signals aggregation jobs.
BPR RecommenderContent-Based RecommenderQuery-to-Query Session-Based SimilarityDefault job name
COLLECTION_NAME_item_recommendationsCOLLECTION_NAME_bpr_item_recsCOLLECTION_NAME_content_recsCOLLECTION_NAME_query_recsDefault input collection
COLLECTION_NAME_signals_aggrCOLLECTION_NAME_signals_aggrCOLLECTION_NAMECOLLECTION_NAME_signalsDefault output collections
COLLECTION_NAME_items_for_user_recommendations COLLECTION_NAME_items_for_item_recommendationsCOLLECTION_NAME_bpr_user_recs COLLECTION_NAME_bpr_item_recsCOLLECTION_NAME_content_recsCOLLECTION_NAME_queries_query_recsRecommendation type
None of the jobs are scheduled by default; you must manually run or schedule them. NOTE:
  • The COLLECTION_NAME_user_item_prefs_agg job provides input data for the ALS and BPR jobs and must run before them. See SQL Aggregations for details.
  • The COLLECTION_NAME_user_query_history_agg job generates aggregations for user-item preferences from signal information.
Managed Fusion does not automatically create a Query-to-Query Session-Based Similarity job, which is needed for certain recommender types.

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Query pipelines

  • COLLECTION_NAME_items_for_user_recommendations Query pipeline to generate recommendations of items for a user.
  • COLLECTION_NAME_items_for_item_recommendations Query pipeline to generate recommendations of items similar to an item. Default items-for-item recommendations pipeline
  • COLLECTION_NAME_queries_query_recs Query pipeline to generate queries-for-query recommendations using a model created by the Query-to-Query Session-Based Similarity job.