Building Recommendation Engines in Python

What problems are recommendation engines designed to solve and what data are best suited for them? Discern what insightful recommendations can be made even with limited data, and learn how to create your own recommendations.

Discover how item attributes can be used to make recommendations. Create valuable comparisons between items with both categorical and text data. Generate profiles to recommend new items for users based on their past preferences.

Discover new items to recommend to users by finding others with similar tastes. Learn to make user-based and item-based recommendations—and in what context they should be used. Use k-nearest neighbors models to leverage the wisdom of the crowd and predict how someone might rate an item they haven’t yet encountered.

Understand how the sparsity of real-world datasets can impact your recommendations. Leverage the power of matrix factorization to deal with this sparsity. Explore the value of latent features and use them to better understand your data. Finally, put the models you’ve discovered to the test by learning how to validate each of the approaches you’ve learned.