Before we build a model, we need to first explore the input data to understand what is available for user-item recommendations. In this section, we will prepare, process, and explore the data, which includes users, items (games), and interactions (hours of gameplay), using the following steps:
- First, let's load some R packages for preparing and processing our input data:
library(keras)
library(tidyverse)
library(knitr)
- Next, let's load the data into R:
steamdata <- read_csv("data/steam-200k.csv", col_names=FALSE)
- Let's inspect the input data using glimpse():
glimpse(steamdata)
This results in the following output:

- Let's manually add column labels to organize this data:
colnames(steamdata) <- c("user", "item", "interaction", "value", "blank...