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)

Introduction

As already mentioned a couple of times, hybrid recommenders are extremely powerful, robust systems that combine various simpler models to give us predictions. There is no single way in which a hybrid model could do this; some hybrids predict using content and collaborative filtering techniques separately to produce results. Some others introduce content-based techniques into collaborative filters and vice versa.

Netflix is a very good example of a hybrid recommender. Netflix employs content-based techniques when it shows you similar movies to a movie you're watching (the MORE LIKE THIS section), as shown in the following screenshot:

Here, we can see that while watching Ratatouille, Netflix recommends movies to me that are very similar to Ratatouille. All the top five recommended movies are all animated and produced by Disney Pixar.

However, animated movies...