Recommendation Insights has previously described the many ways that genetic variations determine any single individual’s wine taste experience: Inherited Taste Chaos Sabotages Recommendations. Now comes this very well-written article that expands that concept: Spit and image: How saliva customizes your wine tasting experience: “Not seeing eye to eye on a wine’s flavor isn’t just about […]
Author Archive | Lewis Perdue
New Research Shows Why Wine Descriptions Don’t Help Consumers Select Wine
New research recently published in the journal Neurocomputing shows one more reason why consumers get little help in choosing wines from the descriptions in wine reviews: the same words mean different things to different people. This fits in with — MISINTERPRETATION: Words = Big Trouble — which is one of the issues that we have […]
Turning White Wine Into Red: Recommendation Failures & The Alchemy Of Context
“[N]o event or object is ever experienced in perfect, objective isolation. It is instead subject to our past experiences, our current mood, our expectations, and any number of incidental details—an annoying neighbor, a waiter who keeps banging your chair, a beautiful painting in your line of sight. With something like wine, all sorts of societal […]
Music Recommendation Engines: Epic Fail
Over the past four years I have used Pandora, Spotify,Rdio, and Slacker Radio. None of these services have done an accurate job of recommending music for me. I have had premium subscriptions at Pandora and Spotify but dropped those because of recommendation failures I have stuck with a premium subscription to Slacker, not because it […]
Wine And Music Are A Lot Alike & So Are The Ways Their Recommendation Systems Fail
Wine and music: please our senses, touch our emotions, beg to be shared, are deeply engrained in how we define ourselves and, can determine how other people judge us. Because of those factors, every recommendation system in use today — including those deployed by Pandora, Spotify, Slacker and other online music sites — fail because of: […]
Machine Learning + Big Data + Tribes = Happier Consumers & Fewer Regulation Hassles
Complaints about the use of personal information for everything from predictive product recommendations to credit ratings and consumer credit card interest rates have provoked lawsuits, increasing consumer outrage, and a growing chorus of demands for tighter governmental controls. The greater accuracy of the Tribes algorithm plus its ability to perform in a totally anonymous data […]
Next Glass: A Step In Solving Wine Rating’s Genetic Issues
NOTE: This article uses “wine” to avoid having to type “beer or wine” everywhere. But, unless noted otherwise, a reference to wine refers to both beer and wine. The Next Glass wine and beer selection app is a step toward more accurate wine recommendations, but faces several substantial hurdles on the path to accuracy, scalability […]
How Predictive Big Data Fails
Recommendations from big data predictive methods are a lot like the use of epidemiology to determine the cause of a disease: Both rely on the statistical analysis and correlation of massive amounts of data. Both are indicative that something is happening. Both can offer insights into a phenomenon. Both are easily derailed by unknown confounding […]
Recommendation News – Nov. 4, 2014
Wine Shopping in Boston Just Got a Lot Easier
Recommendation News – Nov. 3, 2014
Corkz Update Extends Global Reach of the Wine Information App Pandora for beer? Vivino, Club W Use Tech To Help Wine Lovers Find Favorites Damned Experts! Damned “Know-Nothings!” … (Damn You, Consumers) Grade Inflation Is Killing The Value of Wine Reviews Discovering your own taste in wine beyond 100-point scores What’s 97 points between friends? […]