Practical Recommender Systems

Chapter 1. What is a recommender?

It’s a jungle out there as far as understanding what a recommender system is, so we’ll start this book looking into what problems it solves and how it’s used. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Understanding the task a recommender system is trying to emulate
• Developing insight into what are nonpersonalized and personalized recommendations
• Developing a taxonomy of how to describe recommenders
• Introducing the example website MovieGEEKs

Get a cup of coffee and a blanket and make yourself comfortable for this introduction to the world of recommendations. We’ll ease into it, first looking at real-world examples before moving into the computational intricacies of a recommender system in the following chapters. You might feel ...