Mastering Predictive Analytics with R

Other approaches to recommendation systems

In this chapter, we concentrated our efforts on building recommendation systems by following the collaborative filtering paradigm. This is a very popular approach for its many advantages. By essentially mimicking word-of-mouth recommendations, it requires virtually no knowledge about the items being recommended nor any background about the users in question.

Moreover, collaborative filtering systems incorporate new ratings as they arise, either through a memory approach, or via regular retraining of a model-based approach. Thus, they naturally become better for their users over time as they learn more information and adapt to changing preferences. On the other hand, they are not without their disadvantages, ...