Data Mining Applications with R

Chapter 5

Recommender Systems in R

Saurabh Bhatnagar,    New York, USA http://sanealytics.wordpress.com/

Abstract

I will try to give you a practical handle on recommendation systems using examples in R. I will show how you can use off-the-shelf engines, run your own data with them, and most importantly, test them. I will go over several examples of creating a new recommendation system, including SVD (Single Value Decomposition), PCA (Principle Component Analysis), and even stochastic gradient descent based matrix factorization. We will compare these to common engines like User-based and Item-based collaborative filters. I talk about when they fail and some common solutions to those problems. We give the pros and cons of each algorithm not just based ...