Learning Apache Spark 2

Chapter 9. Building a Recommendation System

In the last chapter, we covered the concepts around deploying Spark across various clusters. Over the course of this and the next chapter we will look at some practical use cases. In this chapter, we will look at building a Recommendation System, which is what most of us are building in one way or another. We'll cover the following topics:

• Overview of a recommendation system
• Why do you need a recommendation system?
• The long tail phenomenon
• Types of Recommendations
• Key problems in recommendations
• Content-based recommendations
• Collaborative filtering
• Latent factor models

This chapter will hopefully give you a good introduction to recommender systems, and then follow up with specific code examples to solve a real ...