PROBABILISTIC RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM

A recommendations system uses probabilistic methods to select, from a candidate set of items, a set of items to recommend to a target user. The methods can effectively introduce noise into the recommendations process, causing the recommendations presented to the target user to vary in a controlled manner from one visit to the next. The methods may increase the likelihood that at least some of the items recommended over a sequence of visits will be useful to the target user. Some embodiments of the methods are stateless such that the system need not keep track of which items have been recommended to which users.