Introduction to Recommender Systems

by swGooF on 8/5/2013, 6:19 PM with 48 comments
  • by ghc on 8/5/2013, 6:55 PM

    I can't judge the coursera course, but for anyone who is interested in this field and wants a gentle introduction, I high recommend Programming Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do). It covers many of the types of recommender systems that the coursera course is likely to cover, and comes with a lot of nice Python code examples.

    It's highly useful knowledge too. I ran across so many startups that needed recommender systems that I launched a company called Algorithmic.ly (http://algorithmic.ly) to help companies without the expertise integrate recommendation systems and other types of algorithms into their projects.

  • by eldog_ on 8/5/2013, 7:19 PM

    I'd be interested in knowing how much deep learning is changing the algorithms used in this field, given the performance of restricted boltzmann machines on the netflix data set http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hinton/absps/netflixICML.pdf.

  • by riggins on 8/5/2013, 7:53 PM

    coursera is killing me with courses I want to take.

  • by mark_l_watson on 8/5/2013, 11:26 PM

    If you want a quick start without taking a class, install the Apache Mahout project - one of the Hadoop map-reduce examples is a recommendation system. You can hack away, and run on Elastic MapReduce if you need to scale. (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommend...)

  • by javindo on 8/6/2013, 11:39 AM

    Interesting anecdote: A graduate of my university works for Google who originally had a very complex "machine learning pipeline" for the product recommendations but he has since re-implemented the feature in, as he calls it, a "much simpler bloom filter algorithm".

  • by victorhooi on 8/5/2013, 9:21 PM

    Hmm, seems interesting = I'm currently doing the Machine Learning one also via Coursera, run by Andrew Ng, and it's good gentle introduction to the subject.

    It's a shame we can't view the course content for this one earlier...haha.

  • by oneeyedpigeon on 8/6/2013, 9:36 AM

    I couldn't possibly recommend a site that requires javascript to display any content whatsoever.

  • by axansh on 8/6/2013, 4:47 AM

    Thanks coursera.

    Thank you very much.

    Looking forward for this course.

    You save my some $$$ :) Will surely donate you.

  • by arek2 on 8/6/2013, 11:03 AM

    I'll drop a link to my (non-free) e-book: http://arek-paterek.com/book/

  • by fmela on 8/6/2013, 5:37 PM

    So many great online courses, and so little time!