scikit-rec 0.3.2

A scikit-style recommender systems library

scikit-rec

A composable, scikit-style recommender systems library.

scikit-rec provides a 3-layer architecture that cleanly separates business logic, scoring strategy, and ML models. Any recommender works with any compatible scorer and estimator, giving you a mix-and-match toolkit for building recommendation systems.

Recommender (business logic)  -->  Scorer (item scoring)  -->  Estimator (ML model)

Why scikit-rec?

Composable by design. Each layer is independently extensible. Swap XGBoost for a Two-Tower model without changing your recommender. Add a new bandit strategy without touching the scorer. The library spans XGBoost, LightGBM, and scikit-learn alongside deep learning models (NCF, Two-Tower, DeepFM, SASRec, HRNN), with GPU optional — a pure-NumPy matrix factorization (ALS/SGD) requires no PyTorch. The composable architecture also accommodates novel research: a Goal-Conditioned Supervised Learning (GCSL) recommender for multi-objective recommendation was implemented as a single Recommender subclass — no new scorer or estimator required. Contributions welcome: implement one abstract class and it works with everything else.

Beyond ranking. Contextual bandits (epsilon-greedy, static-action) and heterogeneous treatment effect estimation (T/S/X-Learner) are first-class paradigms, not afterthoughts. All share the same evaluation infrastructure, so you can directly compare a ranking policy against a bandit or uplift policy on the same logged data.

Production-grade evaluation. The most complete offline policy evaluation suite in any recommendation library: IPS, Doubly Robust, SNIPS, Direct Method, Policy-Weighted, and Replay Match, paired with ten ranking, classification, and regression metrics (Precision, Recall, MAP, MRR, NDCG, ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, Expected Reward, RMSE, MAE) — enabling counterfactual policy comparison from logged data with a single call. Multi-label classification and multi-target regression workloads (wide-format MultioutputScorer) get per-label diagnostics and macro-averaged metrics out of the same evaluate() API.

Production readiness. Config-driven pipeline factory with Optuna HPO, low-latency single-user inference (recommend_online), two-stage retrieval-then-ranking, and batch training.

Agent-friendly. Optionally pair with scikit-rec-agent so an LLM agent can build, train, and tune models against this library's contracts.

Learn by example. Ten end-to-end Jupyter notebooks on MovieLens 1M cover ranking, bandits, uplift, sequential recommendations, multi-objective optimization, hyperparameter tuning, two-stage retrieval, and contextual two-tower models. Our SASRec achieves HR@10 = 0.8953 and NDCG@10 = 0.6331 on MovieLens-1M (leave-last-out, 1 positive + 100 negatives). Each notebook downloads data, trains, evaluates, and shows sample recommendations — ready to run.

Installation

pip install scikit-rec

Optional extras:

pip install scikit-rec[torch]    # Deep learning models (DeepFM, NCF, SASRec, HRNN, Two-Tower)
pip install scikit-rec[aws]      # S3 data loading

Quick Start

from skrec.estimator.classification.xgb_classifier import XGBClassifierEstimator
from skrec.scorer.universal import UniversalScorer
from skrec.recommender.ranking.ranking_recommender import RankingRecommender
from skrec.examples.datasets import (
    sample_binary_reward_interactions,
    sample_binary_reward_users,
    sample_binary_reward_items,
)

# Build the pipeline: Estimator -> Scorer -> Recommender
estimator = XGBClassifierEstimator({"learning_rate": 0.1, "max_depth": 5})
scorer = UniversalScorer(estimator)
recommender = RankingRecommender(scorer)

# Train
recommender.train(
    interactions_ds=sample_binary_reward_interactions,
    users_ds=sample_binary_reward_users,
    items_ds=sample_binary_reward_items,
)

# Recommend
interactions_df = sample_binary_reward_interactions.fetch_data()
users_df = sample_binary_reward_users.fetch_data()
recommendations = recommender.recommend(interactions=interactions_df, users=users_df, top_k=5)

Components

Recommenders

Recommender	Description
RankingRecommender	Rank items by predicted score
ContextualBanditsRecommender	Exploration-exploitation strategies (epsilon-greedy, static action)
UpliftRecommender	Uplift modeling (S-Learner, T-Learner, X-Learner)
SequentialRecommender	Sequence-aware recommendations
HierarchicalSequentialRecommender	Session-aware hierarchical sequences (HRNN)
GcslRecommender	Multi-objective goal-conditioned supervised learning

Scorers

Scorer	Description
UniversalScorer	Single global model using item features (auto-dispatches tabular vs. embedding)
IndependentScorer	Separate model per item
MulticlassScorer	Items as competing classes
MultioutputScorer	Wide-format multi-label binary classification or multi-target regression (one ITEM_<name> column per target)
SequentialScorer	For sequential estimators (SASRec)
HierarchicalScorer	For HRNN estimators

Estimators

Type	Models
Tabular	XGBoost, LightGBM, Logistic Regression, sklearn classifiers/regressors, DeepFM
Embedding	Matrix Factorization, NCF, Two-Tower, Deep Cross Network, Neural Factorization Machine
Sequential	SASRec, HRNN

Evaluators

Evaluator	Description
SimpleEvaluator	Standard offline evaluation on held-out data
IPSEvaluator	Inverse Propensity Scoring for counterfactual evaluation
DREvaluator	Doubly Robust — combines direct estimation with IPS
SNIPSEvaluator	Self-Normalized IPS — reduces variance of IPS
DirectMethodEvaluator	Uses a reward model to estimate policy value
PolicyWeightedEvaluator	Weights logged rewards by policy/logging probability ratio
ReplayMatchEvaluator	Unbiased evaluation using only matching logged actions

Metrics

Precision@k, Recall@k, MAP, MRR, NDCG, ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, Expected Reward, RMSE, MAE (the last two for multi-target regression via MultioutputScorer).

Retrievers

Two-stage retrieval: Popularity, Content-Based, Embedding-Based.

Example Notebooks

Notebooks are grouped by dataset under examples/:

MovieLens-1M (examples/movielens-1m/)

Notebook	What it demonstrates
Ranking with XGBoost	Feature-based ranking with demographics and genre features
GCSL Multi-Objective	Goal-conditioned recommendations — steer quality vs. novelty
HPO with Optuna	Hyperparameter tuning with TPE, GP, and CMA-ES samplers
Two-Tower Models	Three context modes: user_tower, trilinear, scoring_layer
SASRec (Positives)	Self-attentive sequential recommendation on positive interactions
SASRec (Ratings)	SASRec with explicit ratings as soft labels
SASRec (MSE)	SASRec regressor with MSE loss
HRNN	Hierarchical RNN for session-aware recommendations

Amazon Books (examples/amazon-books/)

Notebook	What it demonstrates
LightGBM	Fast tabular ranking on Amazon Books with categorical book metadata
DeepFM	Sparse-feature interaction learning with FM + MLP + cross network
NCF	Neural Collaborative Filtering with NeuMF + embedding-based two-stage retrieval
SASRec (Positives)	Sequential recommendation — mirrors the original SASRec paper's Amazon protocol

Generic (examples/generic/) — dataset-agnostic library mechanics

Notebook	What it demonstrates
Factory Pipeline	Config-driven recommender construction on the shipped sample dataset
Two-Stage Retrieval	Popularity, content-based, and embedding retrieval + ranking on synthetic data
Uplift Modeling	S-Learner, T-Learner, X-Learner treatment effect estimation on synthetic data

The MovieLens-1M notebooks download data automatically from GroupLens. The four Amazon Books notebooks share a cached download from McAuley-Lab's Amazon Reviews 2023 via HuggingFace datasets (the first run pays the download cost; subsequent runs reuse the cache). All notebooks include training, evaluation, and sample recommendations.

Documentation

Full documentation is available at intuit.github.io/scikit-rec.

• Architecture overview
• Capability matrix
• Quick start tutorial
• Dataset preparation
• Evaluation guide

Development

git clone https://github.com/intuit/scikit-rec.git
cd scikit-rec
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/

License

Apache 2.0