Personalize filters - Users metadata

Question

For **user-personalization recipe**, I have the following metadata:
* **Users:** User_id, age, gender,
* **Interactions:** User_id, Item_id, event_type,
* **Items:** Item_id, Genre and Item_title.

We want to get the recommendations filtered based on the age. Currently in the create filter step, we aren't able to add Users.age property in our filter for the where clause. Any suggestions on how we can filter on different users metadata for the user personalization recipe?

Answer

Hello,

Is the `age` column listed in the User dataset schema?  You should have an entry similar to:
```json
{
	"name": "AGE",
	"type": "int"
},
```

For the filter, when you go to build the expression, you should select:
* Action = `Include`
* ID = `UserID`

This should allow you to select the WHERE property of `Users.age`.  Screenshot of this below:

![Filter Example](/media/postImages/original/IMZoQnHPOyQZuDiJimQUOKQg)

Answer

Hi, adding to the above.

First: [Filters](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/personalize/latest/dg/filter-expressions.html) are deterministic, [Context](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/personalize/latest/dg/contextual-metadata.html) is a nudge.  A filter will determine the recommendations fully, i.e. nothing that does not match the filter is recommended, while the context will subtly influence the recommendations, i.e. recommendations will be different if your user behaviour is different in different contexts, but there may be overlap in recommended items.

You should use item and user metadata fields if the attribute does not change over (a short) time for the same user or item (user age, user city). You should use context attributes of the interaction that change over time (device type, time of day, ...). Read more about context [here](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/increasing-the-relevance-of-your-amazon-personalize-recommendations-by-leveraging-contextual-information/)

To apply a filter using an user-metadata attribute in the user-personalization recipe, you can add an "IF" clause to the expression:

![Enter image description here](/media/postImages/original/IMbP-MTVACTAGsqnfONEK_tg)
Click on the "+" to add the condition and select the "IF" operator.

Personalize filters - Users metadata

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