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 framework

Just like the knowledge-based and content-based recommenders, we will build our collaborative filtering models in the context of movies. Since collaborative filtering demands data on user behavior, we will be using a different dataset known as MovieLens.

The MovieLens dataset

The MovieLens dataset is made publicly available by GroupLens Research, a computer science lab at the University of Minnesota. It is one of the most popular benchmark datasets used to test the potency of various collaborative filtering models and is usually available in most recommender libraries and packages:

MovieLens gives us user ratings on a variety of movies and is available in various sizes. The full version consists of more than...