Problem
Scenario
You are building a recommendation feed for a consumer app. The system works well for active users and established content, but new users and newly created items have little or no interaction history, so ranking quality drops early in their lifecycle.
Question
How would you handle the cold start problem in a recommendation or ranking system?
What this tests
- Cold start for both users and items
- Retrieval, ranking, and re-ranking design
- Feature store and online versus batch features
- Experimentation and cohort-based evaluation
Practicing as: Software Engineer interview at DEXHi, I'll play your DEX interviewer for the Software Engineer role. Candidates describe these interviews as mixed and moderately difficult, so expect me to be professional and fair. Take your time with the question above and answer like we're in the room.
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