aws personalize user attributes

Question

I see that AWS personalize supports GENRES for items. Can't find anything about preferred GENRES for the users dataset.

• is it supported?
• does it make sense to add preferred GENRES for users dataset?

General question about GENRES field

• doc shows genres as strings like action|comedy
• is it OK to send ids instead of string values 1|42?

and still define GENRES field as categorical string field?

{
          "name": "GENRES",
          "type": "string",
          "categorical": true
}

Isn't it just a math behind the scenes and it doesn't really matter if genre is meaningful name of just a number?

Answer 1

The GENRES column is required when you create a Video On Demand domain dataset group and include an items dataset. For the e-commerce domain dataset group and custom dataset groups, GENRES is not required.

The GENRES field must be marked as categorical in your items dataset schema.

{
  "type": "record",
  "name": "Items",
  "namespace": "com.amazonaws.personalize.schema",
  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "ITEM_ID",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "GENRES",
      "type": "string",
      "categorical": true
    },
    {
      "name": "CREATION_TIMESTAMP",
      "type": "long"
    }
  ],
  "version": "1.0"
}

Categorical fields allow you to specify one or more values for each item where multiple items are separated by |. For example, Action|Adventure. The values you use for genres is dependent on your data. You can use string keywords or numbers. Just make sure that you format the GENRES column as a string and use consistent genre values across your items. Personalize will encode the values you specify when the model is trained.