Small knowledge, big challenge! This article is participating in the creation activity of “Essential Tips for Programmers”.

I have studied recommendation system for a period of time due to the need of my work. Recommendation system is a relatively unique field of machine learning, which has been well developed in recent years and can be regarded as the best practice of machine learning in practice. At present, there are two major development directions of graph convolution and reinforcement learning. But there are also bottlenecks, so how do we break through the limitations of data, how do we connect data to people’s consumption behavior.

Machine learning itself is an application discipline, and interdisciplinary cross-field, not only has depth and breadth, model reflects this complex world. Get nutrition and inspiration from other disciplines, and today we’re going to talk about it

  • psychology
  • economics
  • genetics

The impact of these disciplines on machine learning

Why is behavioural economics back on the radar

  • Behavioral economics is not a new discipline, having been proposed by Adam Smith as early as 1759 in the Theory of Moral Sentiments
  • Whether people are rational or irrational is what distinguishes behavioral economics from other disciplines.
  • Conventional economics has been repressed for years
  • The 2008 financial and economic crisis is a turning point, behavioral economic learning with this opportunity to regain people’s attention
  • The arrival of big data era also promotes the development of behavioral economics
  • Behavioral economics is a supplement and extension of traditional classical economics

What is behavioral economics

Is a discipline that combines psychology and economics and studies how people’s behavior systematically deviates from the traditional “rational man” hypothesis of economics.

Deviation behavior in the definition may be represented by the following behaviors

  • Loss aversion
  • Time preference
  • Social preference
  • Probability judgments

There is a sense of these deviations from the specific performance with specific examples to explain to you

The development of behavioral economics

Age of Adam Smith

  • 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
  • 1776 The Wealth of Nations

The age of neoclassical economics

  • The rational man hypothesis in the 20th century, the mathematization of economics
  • Behavioral economics struggles

Big data era

  • The turning point of the 2008 financial crisis
  • Prosperity in the era of big data

Why study behavioral economics

It explains some of the behavior, why we make these mental decisions. For us personally, we make decisions based on automated biological algorithms. Today, we are surrounded by apps. In the face of big data and algorithms, our calculations become powerless. Algorithms may know us better than we know ourselves. In times like these, to avoid behavioral biases in our economic decisions, we need sources of such behavior. We need to get ahead of the algorithm, understand the decision-making mechanism, correct our biases. This is what motivates us to study behavioral economics as individuals.