As the recommendation systems behind commercial services scale up and apply more and more sophisticated machine learning models, it becomes important to optimize computational cost (capacity) and runtime latency, besides the traditional objective of user engagement. Caching recommended results and reusing them later is a common technique used to reduce capacity and latency. However, the standard caching approach negatively impacts user engagement. To overcome the challenge, this paper presents an approach to optimizing capacity, latency and engagement simultaneously. We propose a smart caching system including a lightweight adjuster model to refresh the cached ranking scores, achieving significant capacity savings without impacting ranking quality. To further optimize latency, we introduce a prefetching strategy which leverages the smart cache. Our production deployment on Facebook Marketplace demonstrates that the approach reduces capacity demand by 50% and p75 end-to-end latency by 35%. While Facebook Marketplace is used as a case study, the approach is applicable to other industrial recommendation systems as well.

MOTIVATION: Single-molecule, real-time sequencing (SMRT) developed by Pacific BioSciences produces longer reads than secondary generation sequencing technologies such as Illumina. The long read length enables PacBio sequencing to close gaps in genome assembly, reveal structural variations, and identify gene isoforms with higher accuracy in transcriptomic sequencing. However, PacBio data has high sequencing error rate and most of the errors are insertion or deletion errors. During alignment-based homology search, insertion or deletion errors in genes will cause frameshifts and may only lead to marginal alignment scores and short alignments. As a result, it is hard to distinguish true alignments from random alignments and the ambiguity will incur errors in structural and functional annotation. Existing frameshift correction tools are designed for data with much lower error rate and are not optimized for PacBio data. As an increasing number of groups are using SMRT, there is an urgent need for dedicated homology search tools for PacBio data. RESULTS: In this work, we introduce Frame-Pro, a profile homology search tool for PacBio reads. Our tool corrects sequencing errors and also outputs the profile alignments of the corrected sequences against characterized protein families. We applied our tool to both simulated and real PacBio data. The results showed that our method enables more sensitive homology search, especially for PacBio data sets of low sequencing coverage. In addition, we can correct more errors when comparing with a popular error correction tool that does not rely on hybrid sequencing. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code is freely available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/frame-pro/ CONTACT: [email protected].