Building Recommendation Engines

Understand your data and user preferences to make intelligent, accurate, and profitable decisions

A recommendation engine (sometimes referred to as a recommender system) is a tool that lets algorithm developers predict what a user may or may not like among a list of given items. Recommender systems have become extremely common in recent years, and are applied in a variety of applications. The most popular ones are movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general.

The book starts with an introduction to recommendation systems and its applications. You will then start building recommendation engines straight away from the very basics. As you move along, you will learn to build recommender systems with popular frameworks such as R, Python, Spark, Neo4j, and Hadoop. You will get an insight into the pros and cons of each recommendation engine and when to use which recommendation to ensure each pick is the one that suits you the best.

During the course of the book, you will create simple recommendation engine, real-time recommendation engine, scalable recommendation engine, and more. You will familiarize yourselves with various techniques of recommender systems such as collaborative, content-based, and cross-recommendations before getting to know the best practices of building a recommender system towards the end of the book!

What You Will Learn

• Build your first recommendation engine
• Discover the tools needed to build recommendation engines
• Dive into the various techniques of recommender systems such as collaborative, content-based, and cross-recommendations
• Create efficient decision-making systems that will ease your work
• Familiarize yourself with machine learning algorithms in different frameworks
• Master different versions of recommendation engines from practical code examples
• Explore various recommender systems and implement them in popular techniques with R, Python, Spark, and others