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Recommender Systems

Coursera · University of Minnesota · 1 HN comments

HN Academy has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Coursera's "Recommender Systems" from University of Minnesota.
Course Description

A Recommender System is a process that seeks to predict user preferences. This Specialization covers all the fundamental techniques in recommender systems, from non-personalized and project-association recommenders through content-based and collaborative filtering techniques, as well as advanced topics like matrix factorization, hybrid machine learning methods for recommender systems, and dimension reduction techniques for the user-product preference space.

This Specialization is designed to serve both the data mining expert who would want to implement techniques like collaborative filtering in their job, as well as the data literate marketing professional, who would want to gain more familiarity with these topics.

The courses offer interactive, spreadsheet-based exercises to master different algorithms, along with an honors track where you can go into greater depth using the LensKit open source toolkit.

By the end of this Specialization, you’ll be able to implement as well as evaluate recommender systems. The Capstone Project brings together the course material with a realistic recommender design and analysis project.

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This course is offered by University of Minnesota on the Coursera platform.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this url.
There are basically 3 types of recommender engines:

Content Based: If you can represent your products as a vector, you can have a distance between each product, then you have a item-item recommendation. You can use all kinds of embedding to achieve this results, some techniques that we tried are word2vec embedding of user navigation, auto encoding of features using neural networks, dimensionality reduction with PCA, ALS, etc. There are lots of libs for solving these problems as is a very studied field, usually numpy and for finding the neighbors we use ann from scikitlearn, because if you have millions of items, you cant just find the distance between all the pairs.

Collaborative - Filtering, here you use the pairs of behavior of the users, <user, item, ranking>. There is a surprise lib in python that works well, you have the MlLib from Spark too, this techniques are called matrix factorization techniques, and also gives you a embedding of the item or the user, and you can apply the techniques of content based to find user-user and item-item recommendations along the user-item recommendations

Hybrid Models: These are the models that use behavior and features of the user an items, LightFM is a good lib that works well, but you can model it with other tools like neural networks ( https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub45530 ).

The challenges are depending on the company, its not the same to recommended small amount of items to large number of users than large number of items to small number users.

There is a whole specialization in coursera that is really good https://www.coursera.org/specializations/recommender-systems

eggie5
I don't understand your connection between lightfm and the youtube paper...
chudi
they are hybrid in the sense that gather signals from not just features or user activity, yt paper uses embeddings from search and views, so its more of a mixed model than a pure one content based or a pure collaborative filtering
eggie5
ok, I see, you are making the connection on basis of hybrid characteristics.

Since you're familiar w/ the youtube paper, I've been wondering this question: How do they get vectors out of the softmax?

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