A Recommendation system for News Push Notifications- Personalizing with a User-based and Content-based Recommendation system

Abstract: The news landscape has changed during recent years because of the digitization. News can nowadays be found in both newspapers and on different sites online. The availability of the digital newspapers leads to competition among the news companies. To make the users stay on one specific platform for news, relevance is required in the content and oneway of creating relevance is through personalization, to tailor the content to each user. The focus of this thesis is therefore personalizing newspush notifications for a digital  newspaper and making them more relevant for users. The project was made in cooperation with VK Media, and their digital newspaper. The task in this thesis is to implement personalization of push notifications by building a recommendation system and to test the implemented system with data from VK. In order to perform the task, a dataset representing reading habits of VK’s users was extracted from their data warehouse. Then a user-based and content-based recommendation system was implemented in Python.The idea with the system is to recommend new articles that are sufficiently similar to one or more of the already read articles. Articles that may be liked by one of the most similar users should also be recommended. Finally, the system’s performance was evaluated with the data representing reading habits for VK’s users. The results show that the implemented system has better performance than the current solution without any personalization, when recommending a few articles to each user. The results from the evaluation also show that the more articles the users have read, the better predictions are possible to make. Thus, this thesis offers a first step towards meeting the expectations of more relevant content among VK’s users.