Mahout in Action

Preface

The path to here, for me (Sean), began in 2005. A friend was starting a company that would lean heavily on collaborative filtering. There were mature, open source packages for this purpose at the time, but they seemed in some ways too elaborate for simple use cases, and in other ways they seemed built for research purposes. For better or worse, I instead prototyped a simple recommender for my friend’s startup, from scratch. The startup, unfortunately, cancelled itself. Nevertheless, I couldn’t bring myself to delete the prototype. It was certainly interesting, so I cleaned and documented it and released it as an open source project called Taste.

Nothing happened for a year. In my spare time, I added pieces and fixed problems, and then ...