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)

Item-based collaborative filtering

Item-based collaborative filtering is essentially user-based collaborative filtering where the users now play the role that items played, and vice versa.

In item-based collaborative filtering, we compute the pairwise similarity of every item in the inventory. Then, given user_id and movie_id, we compute the weighted mean of the ratings given by the user to all the items they have rated. The basic idea behind this model is that a particular user is likely to rate two items that are similar to each other similarly.

Building an item-based collaborative filter is left as an exercise to the reader. The steps involved are exactly the same except now, as mentioned earlier, the movies and users have swapped places.