An approximation algorithm for joint caching and recommendations in cache networks

Abstract: Streaming platforms, like Netflix and YouTube, strive to offer high streaming quality (SQ), in terms of bitrate, delays, etc., to their users. Meanwhile, a significant share of content consumption of these platforms is heavily influenced by recommendations. In this setting, the user's overall experience is a product of both the user's interest in a recommended content, i.e., the recommendation quality (RQ), and the SQ of this content. However, network decisions (like caching) that affect the SQ are usually made without considering the recommender's actions. Likewise, recommendations are chosen independently of the potential delivery quality. In this paper, we define a metric of streaming experience (MoSE) that captures the fundamental tradeoff between the SQ and RQ. We aim to jointly optimize caching and recommendations in a generic network of caches, with the objective of maximizing this metric. This is in line with the recent trend for content providers to simultaneously act as Content Delivery Network owners, implying that the same entity may handle both caching and recommendation decisions. We formulate this joint optimization problem and prove that it can be approximated up to a constant factor. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first polynomial algorithm to achieve a constant approximation ratio for the joint problem. Moreover, our numerical experiments show important performance gains of our algorithm over baseline schemes and existing algorithms in the literature.