US Patent 10290040 Discovering cross-category latent features

The dimensionality of user data can be reduced in order to allow cross-category data to be used to determine recommendations, advertising, or other supplemental content within a specific category. A first reduction in dimensionality results from rolling up category nodes to higher-level nodes. User data for the higher-level nodes can be used to train a neural network, with a user signature being generated using node values from a hidden layer of the trained model. The user signature can then be used to train a category specific model in order to obtain category-specific recommendations, determine category-specific advertising, or select other supplemental content based at least in part upon cross-category data.