Filtering and Ranking

How the building blocks are used to produce recommendations

The purpose of filtering and ranking offers is at the heart of the Best-Next-Action Decisioning process. The process can be summarized as follows:

fn getRecommendations(Offers, Context, Options) -> list[Recommendations]

Offers and context is used to produce a ranked set of recommendations for the customer.

The steps in the filtering process are as follows:

1. Start with the pool of offers that have been constructed
2. Remove all of the offers that do not support the channel requested in the context
3. Remove all of the offers that are not currently valid based on the current date and time
4. Remove all of the offers whose set of inclusion rules do not evaluate to True
5. Remove all of the offers for which any of the exclusion rules evaluate to True

The steps in the ranking process are as follows:

1. Order by category of the remaining offers
2. Within the category order by priority
3. Apply a global rank and a category rank to each remaining offer

There are typically a couple of final options that can be applied to the process:

1. Limit the number of recommendations that are made
2. Return all of the recommendations - even those that were filtered out - this is useful for debugging why customer don’t recieve certain offers and most importantly the reason why they didn’t receive that offer

Worked Example

Imagine that we have the following set of offers defined - I will miss out the content mapping for the moment to make it more concise:

For a getRecommendations call with the channel context “app” first all of the offers that do not support the “app” channel are removed leaving the following offers in the pool:

Next we remove all of the offers which either are not yet valid or have ceased to be valid based on a current date of “2025-01-22” which leaves the following in the offer pool:

Next we remove all of the offers where any of the inclusion rules for an offer evaluate as “True”:

Next we remove all of the offers where any of the exclusion rules for an offer evaluate as “True”:

This will leave the final response as follows where the response will have the offers in this order with the global rank and category rank as given:

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