Building Recommendation Engines in Python

Overview

Learn to build recommendation engines in Python using machine learning techniques.

We’ve come to expect personalized experiences online—whether it’s Netflix recommending a show or an online retailer suggesting items you might also like to purchase. But how are these suggestions generated? In this course, you’ll learn everything you need to know to create your own recommendation engine. Through hands-on exercises, you’ll get to grips with the two most common systems, collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. Next, you’ll learn how to measure similarities like the Jaccard distance and cosine similarity, and how to evaluate the quality of recommendations on test data using the root mean square error (RMSE). By the end of this course, you’ll have built your very own movie recommendation engine and be able to apply your Python skills to create these systems for any industry.

Syllabus

Introduction to Recommendation Engines

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.

Content-Based 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.

Collaborative Filtering

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.

Matrix Factorization and Validating Your Predictions

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.