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Showing posts from July, 2013

Is there such a thing as "best" Recommender System algorithm?

I received emails from users asking which recommender system algorithm they should use . Usually people start looking for articles on which approach has a better performance, and once they find something convincing they start to implement it. I believe that the best recommender system depends on the data and the problem you have to deal with. With that in mind, I decided to publish here some pros and cons for each recommender type (collaborative, content and hybrid), so people can decide for their own what algoritms better suit their needs. I've already presented these approaches here , so if you know nothing about recommender systems, you can read it there first. Collaborative Filtering Pros Recommends diverse items to users, being innovative; Good practical results (read Amazon's article ); It is widely used, and you can find several OpenSource  implementations of it ( Apache Mahout ); It can be used on ratings from users on items; It can deal with video and

Recommender Systems Online Free Course on Coursera

I already talked about Coursera's great courses here . There is a new course on Recommender Systems starting in September: https://www.coursera.org/course/recsys I don't know how it is going to be, but based on the courses I've done so far, it looks good.