Recommendations engine settings

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You can configure how the recommendations engine works by navigating to Quick-access menu > Plugins > Machine learning settings > Recommendation engine.

Note that the legacy Recommender engine is deprecated as of Totara 17. The current recommendations functionality is provided by the Machine Learning Service.

For technical setup and configuration details, see the Machine Learning Service developer documentation.

Additional information about how recommendations work (including AI powered recommendations) can be found in the Recommendations developer documentation.

Remember to click Save changes when you have finished configuring these settings. The other settings on the Recommendation engine page are only used by the legacy recommendation engine, and will be deprecated in a future release.

The Recommendation algorithm and Processing threads configurations can be modified from their default values by setting environment variables before starting the Machine Learning Service, as described in the README.md file of the Machine Learning Service (integration/extensions/ml_service/README.md).

Setting

Description

Notes

Number of items-to-user recommendations

Select the number of items-to-user recommendations generated by the recommendations engine.

The default/recommended value is 5.

Number of items-to-item recommendations

Select the number of items-to-item recommendations generated by the recommendations engine.

The default/recommended value is 5.

Time to analyse interactions

Set the time period (in weeks) from which user-item interaction data will be drawn.

The default/recommended value is 16 weeks.

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