Book Image

Hands-On Recommendation Systems with Python

By : Rounak Banik
Book Image

Hands-On Recommendation Systems with Python

By: Rounak Banik

Overview of this book

Recommendation systems are at the heart of almost every internet business today; from Facebook to Net?ix to Amazon. Providing good recommendations, whether it's friends, movies, or groceries, goes a long way in defining user experience and enticing your customers to use your platform. This book shows you how to do just that. You will learn about the different kinds of recommenders used in the industry and see how to build them from scratch using Python. No need to wade through tons of machine learning theory—you'll get started with building and learning about recommenders as quickly as possible.. In this book, you will build an IMDB Top 250 clone, a content-based engine that works on movie metadata. You'll use collaborative filters to make use of customer behavior data, and a Hybrid Recommender that incorporates content based and collaborative filtering techniques  With this book, all you need to get started with building recommendation systems is a familiarity with Python, and by the time you're fnished, you will have a great grasp of how recommenders work and be in a strong position to apply the techniques that you will learn to your own problem domains.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

The Pandas library

Pandas is a package that gives us access to high-performance, easy-to-use tools and data structures for data analysis in Python.

As we stated in the introduction, Python is a slow language. Pandas overcomes this by implementing heavy optimization using the C programming language. It also gives us access to Series and DataFrame, two extremely powerful and user-friendly data structures imported from the R Statistical Package.

Pandas also makes importing data from external files into the Python environment a breeze. It supports a wide variety of formats, such as JSON, CSV, HDF5, SQL, NPY, and XLSX.

As a first step toward working with pandas, let's import our movies data into our Jupyter Notebook. To do this, we need the path to where our dataset is located. This can be a URL on the internet or your local computer. We highly recommend downloading the data...