Recommender systems are common these days. You may not have noticed, but you might already be a user or receiver of such a system somewhere. Most of the well-performing e-commerce platforms use recommendation systems to recommend items to their users. When you see on the Amazon website that a book is recommended to you based on your earlier preferences, purchases, and browse history, Amazon is actually using such a recommendation system. Similarly, Netflix uses its recommendation system to suggest movies for you.

A recommender or recommendation system is used to recommend a product or information often based on user characteristics, preferences, history, and so on. So, a recommendation is always personalized.

Until recently, it was not so easy or straightforward to build a recommender, but Azure ML makes it really easy to build one as long as you have your data ready.

This chapter introduces you to the concept of recommendation systems and also the model available...